Solid State Drives (SSD) use different media and storage technologies than conventional Hard Disk Drives. Since SSD uses compression and over-provisioning to increase device performance and lifetime, a single overwriting pass is not enough to clean a whole storage and traditional schemes may not guarantee the desired result.
Before selecting the wiping scheme to use for the wiping process, you should take into account the following factors:
- Due to SSD's internal compression, only random passes can be effective on some drives
- By featuring reserved area (typically 7-20%), a single wiping pass has no chance to overwrite the entire SSD; 2 passes minimum are required
- Frequent or massive SSD overwrites reduce the drive lifetime
To achieve the best wiping results on SSD with BCWipe Total WipeOut use the 3-pass US DoD or US DoE or Jetico SSD wiping scheme.
While the first two passes overwrite the drive with minimal impact on lifetime, the last pass runs the ATA Secure Erase hardware sanitization command to meet the NIST Purge-level erasure .