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Why is Secure Erase never mentioned in these articles? Not every drive supports it but it is a more secure way to erase SSDs and a faster way to erase self-enc
by projektfu 5y ago
Why is Secure Erase never mentioned in these articles? Not every drive supports it but it is a more secure way to erase SSDs and a faster way to erase self-encrypting disks. Also, for disks that require a full overwrite, it puts the disk into a mode that will continue running to completion even after a power failure.
On spinning disks, it might be good to cover your deletions as you go with random data, but you can’t use dd to do that. You’d need a filesystem-aware tool. On SSDs, the TRIM function may help you approach that.
https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase
- tedunangst 5y agoPersonally, I would never trust the drive to implement secure erase in a secure manner.
- scrapheap 5y agoSecure Erase is a very good method of erasing drives. However, this article wasn't looking at how to erase the content of the drive, it was looking at how to fill a drive/partition with randomness in preparation for using an encrypted file system on it (the randomness of the data the partition is filled with is important to help hinder cryptanalysis attempts).