6.4 Deleting data from an SSD

“What about deleting data on an SSD?” asked Rupert.

“Well, of course, you can still physically destroy the drive, but degaussing does not work because SSDs do not rely on magnetism to store zeros and ones. However, most SSD manufacturers have a utility for managing and securely erasing their SSDs using a command called ATA Secure Erase. This works in a similar way to that of the TRIM command that garbage collects memory when a file is deleted, except the ATA Secure Erase command resets the whole of the SSD by applying a spike of voltage to all of the memory cells simultaneously, flushing out all of the stored electrons and forcing the drive to ‘forget’ all of its data.”