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  • ozymandias117@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    With an HDD, your operating system can (mostly) directly access bits on the magnetic disks, so you can wipe them by just writing 0 to it over and over (historically, there was a paper saying 7 times would make any bits unrecoverable - this changed as density got higher)

    With SSDs, your operating system has very little control over what bits a write is touching, a lot more was moved into the firmware on the flash memory itself

    So SSDs need a special command “Secure Erase” to wipe them

    • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It’s worth it to mention that after a single pass it was possible to recover single bits with an electron microscope, but not even a full byte. One pass has always been enough to delete actually meaningful data.