We’d like to avoid such practices in the future. Is this 100% true? Because if true, then giving a second lease of life to SSDs is not possible in many cases? I’m thinking about the big scandal of many corporates which prefer to destroy storage media rather than passing them on. It’s not possible to reliably wipe an SSD I wanted to better understand your following statement though: I also had not head of ShredOS previously, and it does indeed to operate quite in the same way as DBAN.

If you’re a drug barron, then yeah, go ahead and use it! (And with a bit of luck the Serious Crime Squad might still be able to get enough evidence to put you away.) The TL DR? Unless the intelligence services of a nation state might be interested in the data, DBAN, nwipe or ShredOS should all be fine.

It may be that DBAN is built on a Linux which doesn’t understand TRIM, but since you’re writing to every addressable sector, I can’t see that TRIM would make a difference.

But even so, a specialist data recovery firm could probably unsolder the storage chips and recover some data, even if only from disused worn sectors, for a 3 or 4 figure sum. Multiple overwrites is completely pointless, except in as much as it may result in all viable sectors being recycled at least once. Previous existing data will remain in sectors awaiting recycling, and if the drive has detected that any are giving soft errors above a certain threshold they will be permanently left in a pool of worn sectors. If you write to every addressable sector, it’ll simply allocate new sectors for the zeros you’re writing - but the drive’s garbage collection will already have cleared them. It’s important to note, though, that it’s not possible to reliably wipe an SSD. It doesn’t connect to the Internet (or any network) so its attack surface is essentially zero. Apart from that I wouldn’t worry about lack of updates. Maybe DBAN no longer boots easily under UEFI. I’ve used DBAN and nwipe a fair few times but ShredOS is new to me. Can you explain please? DBAN, nwipe and ShredOS all use essentially the same code to do the wiping, with (as far as I can make out) pretty much identical user interface. You say “by its nature” DBAN won’t work on SSDs.

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