Solid state drives hard to erase, experts warn

Solid state drives may help computer users boot up faster but experts have warned that the devices are actually quite hard to erase.

Researchers at the University of California have said in a new study that magnetic storage can be erased more easily than newer solid state drives.

“Newer solid state disks, however, have a much different internal architecture, so it is unclear whether what has worked on magnetic media will work on SSDs as well,” the researchers say.

They conducted a study in which 14 different file deletion techniques were used on both traditional hard drives and on solid state discs. The solid state discs still had data on them when all the techniques were used.

“Our results show that naïvely applying techniques designed for sanitizing hard drives on SSDs, such as overwriting and using built-in secure erase commands is unreliable and sometimes results in all the data remaining intact,” the researchers said. 

“Furthermore, our results also show that sanitizing single files on an SSD is much more difficult than on a traditional hard drive.”