Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. And now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then we'll turn to the community for your take. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.
How can I safely erase the data from my SSD drive? I've seen a few pieces in recent days about how traditional "secure delete" programs fail to work properly on SSD drives, so what tools are available and useful?
As pointed out in a recent research article, there isn't a standard method for securely deleting data from a solid state drive. Hard disk drives have had this problem solved for ages, and can execute a secure delete by filling the space occupied by an incriminating file with zeroes or multiple writes of different characters. We'll go into why this approach and some other secure erase methods don't really work on an SSD, especially not for individual files, and then describe some approaches you might take to make sure all your old data is gone for good.
We did an Ask Ars not long ago concerning the way that SSDs handle deletion and cleanup of old files, and we'll assume you've read it or have equivalent knowledge. Basically, the issue with SSDs is this—let's say your SSD is a pirate, and your data is buried treasure. If you tell an SSD pirate to make his buried treasure disappear, all he really does is burn the treasure map. The buried treasure is still out there for someone to find if they know where to look. This isn't the case for all SSDs in the long term, but it is the case for all of them in the short term.
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