Crypto/Block Erase
Crypto/Block Erase
Posted Apr 6, 2017 4:18 UTC (Thu) by fratti (subscriber, #105722)In reply to: An update on storage standards by MattJD
Parent article: An update on storage standards
It seems more likely to me that Crypto- and Block-Erase would simply be ineffective in SSDs, though I do not know much about NVMe. SSDs usually hide the actual cells behind a controller that does cell wear management and garbage collection.
This is also why SSD lives are actually longer than some people think, and why it's a good idea to leave a portion of your SSD unoccupied at all times. The controller will shuffle around which cells it uses to write to in order to ensure that all cells are worn about equally. As a side effect, this means that doing things such as writing random data over "the entire" drive is not guaranteed to actually destroy all data on it, since the controller may distribute that written data over the cells as it sees fit, as if there was another block layer below the block layer of the OS.