Solid State Drive Knowledge Base

Typically, drive wiping software does not damage an SSD drive; however, it might cause the NAND flash cells to wear out faster.

SSDs do not need to be opened inside a cleanroom. Unlike common hard drives that contain spinning platters sealed inside an enclosure, SSDs have no moving parts but are still susceptible to other types of failures.

As of this writing, QLC NAND is the newest and densest flash. We would expect to see this technology continue to drop in price and rise in capacities available.

Granulators, also known as shredders, are machines that rip, tear or smash a hard drive or SSD into small pieces, making it inoperable and not possible to recover any data. Data that is no longer need by the organization for the business, legal, or retention requirements can be safely and permanently destroyed using a granulator. Organizations can reduce the risk of security breaches and reduce storage costs by disposing of data no longer needed.

Best practices involve using data erasure software to securely overwrite data on hard drives and SSDs, including the hidden areas and remapped sectors. Erasure is done per government standards such as NIST, DOD, and many more. Erasure software is used before the drives are transported to equipment for physical destruction to eliminate the possibility of data being intercepted during transport.

Physical destruction of hard disk drives can be done with a degausser that uses a powerful magnetic field, which erases not only the data but removes the servo tracks, making the media unusable. The most permanent and final destruction solution involves the use of granulators, also known as shredders. These machines rip, tear, or smash a hard drive or SSD into pieces so small that data cannot be recovered from the media or memory chips.

If best practices are followed during data destruction, there is no way to recover data from a shredded hard drive or SSD, especially if data erasure software or a degausser (HDD) was used before shredding. However, if a drive was not erased before shredding and the equipment was not set up to create small enough pieces, a full memory chip might be knocked off an SSD without being destroyed, which can be recovered by a data recovery expert like Ontrack. Improper setup of a shredder/granulator could also lead to an entire disk platter being left intact after a drive is run through shredder set up for a much larger enterprise drive, but such an occurrence would be highly unlikely.