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Secure erase flash drives

A

ALnerd

Junior Member
Hello everybody! New here.
I was reading about secure erase of HDDs and SSDs. SSDs have complicated logic but they are basicly a flash memory, not magnetic like HDDs. HDDErase will handle secure erase of SSDs as I understand it so noone will be able to restore data from such SSD. But what about general "flash drives"? Will HDDErase erase data from them securely? Or if not, what will? If Flash drive contains really sensitive data.
 
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To my knowledge you cannot run secure erase on a flash drive. The only way to make sure the data is gone is to overwrite it.
 
This is one reason why you should ONLY use flash drives with a TrueCrypt volume on them, if you are storing sensitive/personal data.

Then you can wipe them with vconsole.com 's USB flash drive tool.
 
I second corkyg's suggestion for DiskWipe. It's a very useful program. However I also found it just as easy to use Window's format, but turn the 'quick format' off. It will write zeros to the entire partition. Another suggestion that someone on this forum mentioned as a joke was to write porn to it. That actually was the fastest way to overwrite my information. 🙂
 
You can't just overwrite a file to securely erase on a flash drive due to internal logical to physical remapping of flash blocks by the controller. When you overwrite a file, the new contents will simply go to the next free flash block. The old block will be erased later by the controller during idle/garbage collection cycles, but only if no other files are using parts of that block. Until that happens, the contents of the old file will still reside in that flash block.

The only way to securely erase a flash memory drive without a built in secure erase function is to completely overwrite the entire media to full capacity such that there are no more free flash blocks so that every block must be erased and overwritten.
 
Thanks for replys!

exdeath said:
The only way to securely erase a flash memory drive without a built in secure erase function is to completely overwrite the entire media to full capacity such that there are no more free flash blocks so that every block must be erased and overwritten.
Click to expand...
Will "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/$FLASH_DRIVE" do?

And do flash drives have any hidden data places like HDD have for reallocating bad blocks?
 
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In the event you have a Hard Disk, SSD, or any kind of non-volatile memory crash and need replacement I guess sensitive data would still be there un-protected and un-deleteable is this correct?

Thankx
 
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