Aloha,
Just read the materials at the bottom of this site:
http://nvsl.ucsd.edu/sanitize/ http://nvsl.ucsd.edu/sanitize/
(NOTE: Please read the papers at the bottom of this site in their entirety before you reply to this post with an opinion.)
Couldn't help but notice a few things. First of all, this quote:
"We conclude that the complexity of SSDs relative to hard drives requires that they provide built-in sanitization commands. Our tests show that since manufacturers do not always implement these commands correctly, the commands should be verifiable as well. Current and proposed ATA and SCSI standards provide no mechanism for verification and the current trend toward encrypting SSDs makes verification even harder."
Also, noticed one of the SSDs they tested was an SLC 32GB (no model or manufacturer specifiec, but could be the X25-E series).
A key point here is that even though Intel (SSD Toolbox) or CMRR (HDDErase) has supplied tools for "erasing" your SSDs, it does NOT mean those SSDs should ever be released or tossed in the trash if they ever held confidential information (which they mostly like have, if you consider passwords, credit card numbers, or SSNs confidential). In the case of government, it means you shouldn't use a classified SSD and re-use it on an unclassified system, even after sanitizing.
Intel, can you provide some insight to this issue regarding your products? Specifically, will the SSD Toolbox verify and confirm all data is erased from an SSD, including any and all over-provisioned or "marked bad" data blocks? And, are there any tools which can let us, the end-user, visually check every writable bit of flash memory on the SSD?
Thanks to all for any input.
