Sciweavers

FAST
2011

Reliably Erasing Data from Flash-Based Solid State Drives

12 years 7 months ago
Reliably Erasing Data from Flash-Based Solid State Drives
Reliably erasing data from storage media (sanitizing the media) is a critical component of secure data management. While sanitizing entire disks and individual files is well-understood for hard drives, flash-based solid state disks have a very different internal architecture, so it is unclear whether hard drive techniques will work for SSDs as well. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of hard drive-oriented techniques and of the SSDs’ built-in sanitization commands by extracting raw data from the SSD’s flash chips after applying these techniques and commands. Our results lead to three conclusions: First, built-in commands are effective, but manufacturers sometimes implement them incorrectly. Second, overwriting the entire visible address space of an SSD twice is usually, but not always, sufficient to sanitize the drive. Third, none of the existing hard drive-oriented techniques for individual file sanitization are effective on SSDs. This third conclusion leads us to dev...
Michael Yung Chung Wei, Laura M. Grupp, Frederick
Added 28 Aug 2011
Updated 28 Aug 2011
Type Journal
Year 2011
Where FAST
Authors Michael Yung Chung Wei, Laura M. Grupp, Frederick E. Spada, Steven Swanson
Comments (0)