Why data recovery is virtually impossible on internal solid state Drives

Did you know that when your computer deletes a file, it may not really be deleted? Instead, your computer has simply marked the file as unimportant. If your computer marks a file unimportant due to accidental erasure, this can cost UK businesses more than £12 billion a year for data recovery and to upgrade security against accidental file deletions. However, this may not be the most frustrating part of accidental file erasure. If a computer marks a file as unimportant, your operating system may rewrite these sectors anytime that it needs more space? However, if there are bits of unused space in an empty sector, this can be as quickly recovered as the amount of time it takes to recover a sector that has been used and overwritten. However, the process works differently with solid state drives.

Before data can be written in a solid state drive, a flash memory cell must be cleared. Since new drives are empty, they easily can be written. However, on a full drive, there are written files with bits of deleted files lingering around. Writing to a drive takes longer because the driver writes the information much slower. This also means that the driver naturally slows down over time.

Solving the writing problem and protecting Data

Trim was introduced to solve the problem of a driving being slow to clear sectors so that new data can be stored. However a Trim command helps protect data because it makes it virtually impossible for data on internal solid state disk drives to be deleted. This doesn’t apply to external disk drives though.  Why doesn’t Trim work over USB drives or Firewire interfaces? The Trim command is not supported on these formats.

This may be good news for businesses, who 58 percent of employees admitted to causing security breaches, no doubt due to accidental data erasure. This means deleted files can be recovered from external hard drives because files are sitting in memory, waiting to be retrieved. However, this also can mean that these files are as vulnerable as traditional magnetic disk drives, since the data can be recovered and still fall into the wrong hands.