Missed the track 🍋

A Reddit person came forward to tell a story after he bought a punched second-hand SSD, thinking it was a destroyed drive, but when he tried it out, he found that the SSD was still working normally, and importantly, the internal data was complete.

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Investigations have shown that the drive has been through the process of destroying data by using a drill through the case, according to a popular practice used by many organizations before discarding or reselling IT equipment, but the hole is only hit by the cover, not even by the PCB or the NAND Flash chip that is the storage part, making this destruction hardly affect internal data.

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This event echoes a common misunderstanding about breaking SSDs. Many people are familiar with the storage HDD on a magnetic dish that consumes almost a full body of space. The puncture is often hit by a key point, but the new SSD 2.5 has a small circuit board, placed only in some corners of the case. It is not the old-fashioned full-area big circuit board, leaving a lot of space as a gap. Random puncture has a very high chance of missing out.

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According to a standard approach like NIST SP 800-88, data destruction requires both hardware destruction and verification, not just breaking and ending. For SSDs, a safer way is to use Secure Erase, encrypt data from the beginning and break the decryption key, or use a specialized media disruptor that digests parts that cannot be recovered.

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This case is therefore an important lesson: punching an SSD hole without knowing the internal chip location can mislead the data to be destroyed, when it is actually complete, and in an age when the data is more valuable than the hardware, small mistakes can become a huge risk to the organization immediately.

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Source: Tom's Hardware

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