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A comment on How secure is merely TRIMing all of a SSD's blocks?. Parent comment

Re:How secure is merely TRIMing all of a SSD's blocks? by bcoates on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @10:34AM (#35070249)
As mentioned in the article, that's not reliable. Drives have lots of overprovision blocks and there's no way of consistently forcing them to be used; and drives might mark blocks as too questionable/worn to reuse and never reset them.

Also a standard failure mode of SSDs is refusing to accept writes, so you'll have to handle that case.

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Re:How secure is merely TRIMing all of a SSD's blocks? by georgyo on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @10:50AM (#35070472)
Encryption plus a single rewrite is likely many times more sufficient than ever needed.

Even if there is a massive 10% block reserve, you looking at a random 10% of an entire encrypted drive.

Figuring out how to just decrypt those blocks is a very hard challenge, then figuring out the SSD block mapping is going to be very challenging, and then for a chance to maybe get something valuable from that 10%.

Multiple very difficult challenges for only a chance of maybe recovering something useful.

Related, I just had a hard drive head crash. I was able to use dd_rescue to read out 40% of the drive before it fully gave out. It's amazing, but at least NTFS stores data everywhere. I recovered a few small plain text file, but not a single image was recoverable. It was pretty shocking to me.

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