X25-V: What is the difference between "enhanced secure erase"and "secure erase"?

[idata]

Hello,

The X25 SSD lines present two different ATA commands for securely erasing data, both the regular 'secure erase' command, and the 'enhanced secure erase' command are available. What these commands do depends completely on the drive's internal implementation. I cannot seem to find any documentation detailing what the difference between these two ATA commands are with these drives.

I have read on other forums for other SSDs various suggestions, such as "most SSDs block the enhanced parameter as it has a good probability of wiping the firmware" and "tries to erase blocks marked as bad and uses a fancy pattern instead of setting all the bits to empty". These are just speculations, and likely not correct for the X25 SSD.

Can someone please shed some light on what specifically these commands do, and their difference?

Thank you!

[idata]

Secure Erase goes through and marks each cell as empty.

Enhanced Secure Erase generates a new public encryption key so the data is basically undecipherable. It is very fast... only a few seconds to make your data unrecoverable.

[idata]

I understood that encryption wasn't added until the 320 series, the X25-M 3rd generation (the Postville Refresh). I cannot find any specifications for the X25-V which says that there is encryption. Can you provide a reference for this?

If I look at ftp://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/ssd/pdfsX25-M_34nm_DataSheet.pdf ftp://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/ssd/pdfsX25-M_34nm_DataSheet.pdf - I do not see encryption.

[idata]

So how does "marks each cell as empty" == "secure erase"??? Sounds more like a "Quick Erase" to me as all of the data still resides on the flash chips.