So you think you deleted all that chunk of data ? Well, not that much!

According to scientists “traditional” disk-erasure techniques are not efficient on flash drives (SSD, Solid State Device) and large part of data thought to be deleted is still on the drive.

Even when the next-generation storage devices show that files have been deleted, as much as 75 percent of the data contained in them may still reside on the flash-based drives…

The difficulty of reliably wiping SSDs stems from their radically different internal design. Traditional ATA and SCSI hard drives employ magnetizing materials to write contents to a physical location that’s known as the LBA, or logical block address. SSDs, by contrast, use computer chips to store data digitally and employ an FTL, or flash translation later, to manage the contents. When data is modified, the FTL frequently writes new files to a different location and updates its map to reflect the change.

“These differences between hard drives and SSDs potentially lead to a dangerous disconnect between user expectations and the drive’s actual behavior,” the scientists, from the University of California at San Diego, wrote in a 13-page paper. “An SSD’s owner might apply a hard drive-centric sanitization technique under the misguided belief that it will render the data essentially irrecoverable. In truth, data may remain on the drive and require only moderate sophistication to extract.”

Indeed, the researchers found that as much 67 percent of data stored in a file remained even after it was deleted from an SSD using the secure erase feature offered by Apple’s Mac OS X. Other overwrite operations – which securely delete files by repeatedly rewriting the data stored in a particular disk location – failed by similarly large margins when used to erase a single file on an SSD. Pseudorandom Data operations, for instance, allowed as much as 75 percent of data to remain, while the British HMG IS5 technique allowed as much as 58 percent.

Whole-disk wiping techniques faired only slightly better with SSD media. In the most extreme case, one unnamed SSD model still stored 1 percent of its 1 GB of data even after 20 sequential overwrite passes on the entire device. Other drives were able to securely purge their contents after two passes, but most of them required from 58 hours to 121 hours for a single pass, making the technique unviable in most settings.

Right now, SSDs are most often encountered in USB thumb drives, and it’s not unusual for them to hold as much as 32 GB of data. An increasing number of laptops by default ship with SSDs installed as the primary storage mechanism. Flash storage underpins that vast majority of smartphones, as well.

The full paper can be obtained here (PDF version)

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