Once you go SSD you... go back?

[Constantine1337]

That article has been picked apart by individuals especially if you look at the comments and know a thing or two about SSDs.




Really? Remind me to stay away from these reviewers in the future. He seemed to know his stuff, too. I'm not really sure how they really thought that the SECURE_ERASE command that should take about thirty seconds on a smallish ssd is the same as a zero write which could take an hour or two.

You are right, but your elaboration is wrong

Using DiskUtility writes 0s on your SSD. Therefore, your SSD cells are full with 0s.
Secure Erase on the other hand erases SSD cells. Therefore the cells are empty (which is what they were actually aiming for).

 

[Eddyisgreat]

You are right, but your elaboration is wrong

Using DiskUtility writes 0s on your SSD. Therefore, your SSD cells are full with 0s.
Secure Erase on the other hand erases SSD cells. Therefore the cells are empty (which is what they were actually aiming for).

LoL When did I say S.E. didn't erase (actually reset to empty) the cells?

 

[Constantine1337]

LoL When did I say S.E. didn't erase (actually reset to empty) the cells?

I thought the only difference you were highlighting was the time needed to do the erase. Hence why I... well... clarified what you meant

 

[milan03]

Good luck waiting about 10 months till it comes out.

FYI, while you're waiting for your favorite Intel drive that's coming out 3rd quarter of next year, here is something that's coming out before and it already makes that Intel SSD OLD... http://www.anandtech.com/show/3971/...troller-sf2000-capable-of-500mbs-and-60k-iops

 

[timbloom]

You are right, but your elaboration is wrong

Using DiskUtility writes 0s on your SSD. Therefore, your SSD cells are full with 0s.
Secure Erase on the other hand erases SSD cells. Therefore the cells are empty (which is what they were actually aiming for).

I know this topic is old, but I stumbled upon it looking for other information.

Apple's Secure Erase option does not "empty" any space used. It intended to just overwrite the data on a magnetic platter (that can stick around for some time even after being overwritten for forensic recovery) numerous times with various random and set patterns to make it virtually impossible to recover the original data. I little primer can be found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24002

Unless Apple has changed things in their OS since then to accommodate the way SSDs work but bypassed the more obvious TRIM support issue, I would have to come to the conclusion that neither of these things will do what actually needs to be done, but "secure erase" will just cause more unneeded writes to the drive. Both ways end up with (useless) data still on the drive, zeroing just fills it with 0's and secure will likely be filled with random bits.

Just a couple pennies.

 

[Eddyisgreat]

Unless Apple has changed things in their OS since then to accommodate the way SSDs work but bypassed the more obvious TRIM support issue, I would have to come to the conclusion that neither of these things will do what actually needs to be done, but "secure erase" will just cause more unneeded writes to the drive. Both ways end up with (useless) data still on the drive, zeroing just fills it with 0's and secure will likely be filled with random bits.

Just a couple pennies.

I think I know what you are trying to get at. DiskUtility and Secure Erase as constantine was trying to mention are two separate things. Don't think of "Secure Erase" as what you find in the disk utility. That's not what we are talking about. The ATA SECURE ERASE command is slightly more serious and cannot be invoked via disk utility. It doesn't fill the cells, it resets them to empty. No data, empty.