Sinistral Posted June 7, 2010 Share Posted June 7, 2010 My system partition (C drive) is a solid state drive. I use a 1.5 TB SATA drive on D for everything else. Is it harmful to the solid state drive if I wipe the free space on it? Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mr don Posted June 7, 2010 Share Posted June 7, 2010 My system partition (C drive) is a solid state drive. I use a 1.5 TB SATA drive on D for everything else. Is it harmful to the solid state drive if I wipe the free space on it? Thanks. You will always kill off write cycles on a drive by wiping it. If you have critical data to get rid of, by all means, wipe it, unless you would rather they recover it & get you in trouble! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ishan_rulz Posted June 7, 2010 Share Posted June 7, 2010 Please read the thread http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=28349 and decide for yourself My suggestion would be: don't. Simplicity is hard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sinistral Posted June 7, 2010 Author Share Posted June 7, 2010 Thanks for the info guys. I didn't think it would be all that smart (especially if you did multiple passes) since it's rewriting info on the drive. My drive supports TRIM but I wonder what would be the best solution for older SSD that don't support it. I guess conventional erasure methods are really the only option. I stopped the wiping process on C part way through so I'll just have cross my fingers and hope I can reboot successfully next time I shut down! I'm going to make a 1:1 copy of C on D just to be safe. I'm sure a lot of people don't even realize they use solid state technology all the time with flash drives and memory cards. I use a program, Smart Defrag, that has an option to disable defrag optimizations on solid state drives. Piriform really should implement an option (on by default preferably) to prevent re-write cycles on solid state media. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aethec Posted June 7, 2010 Share Posted June 7, 2010 WFS is a bad idea - period. Unless (only exception) you want to sell your drive. Piriform French translator Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daveyboye Posted June 7, 2010 Share Posted June 7, 2010 My topic has got locked, but MrT has been in contact with me. This is what I wrote back to him: Well, we stopped the testing after confirming it with 3 SSDs on a Win 7 x64 platform. My writer's assistant has been doing some research on the specific Write File Windows API, and actually has found that it is frowned upon the SSD community. What that API does is write to any space on the hard drive that currently has no files, or files that aren't allocated by windows resources or programs...then completely delete that space. My contact with OCZ in their inspection of the returned drives has found that the firmware has been erased. Without any present firmware on a SSD, it makes it completely invisible to both Bios and Windows. However, the SSD can still be recovered, but by no conventional means. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sinistral Posted June 7, 2010 Author Share Posted June 7, 2010 WFS is a bad idea - period.Unless (only exception) you want to sell your drive. Can you explain that a bit more please? I thought WFS was good every once in a while (maybe every 6 months) on traditional hard drive disks . Maybe I'm confused at what WFS is intended for. I thought it was to write over the free space left by deleted files (just for general security reasons). If you wanted to sell the drive wouldn't you want to do a few write-passes over the entire drive rather than just free space? My topic has got locked, but MrT has been in contact with me. This is what I wrote back to him:Well, we stopped the testing after confirming it with 3 SSDs on a Win 7 x64 platform. My writer's assistant has been doing some research on the specific Write File Windows API, and actually has found that it is frowned upon the SSD community. What that API does is write to any space on the hard drive that currently has no files, or files that aren't allocated by windows resources or programs...then completely delete that space. My contact with OCZ in their inspection of the returned drives has found that the firmware has been erased. Without any present firmware on a SSD, it makes it completely invisible to both Bios and Windows. However, the SSD can still be recovered, but by no conventional means. Looks like the only thing to do then is to send the drive back to the manufacturer and hope then restore the firmware. I'm terribley scared about shutting my computer down now, even though I canceled the WFS partially through! Let's hope Piriform adds a flash media feature in the next version of CCleaner! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aethec Posted June 7, 2010 Share Posted June 7, 2010 Can you explain that a bit more please? I thought WFS was good every once in a while (maybe every 6 months) on traditional hard drive disks . Maybe I'm confused at what WFS is intended for. I thought it was to write over the free space left by deleted files (just for general security reasons). If you wanted to sell the drive wouldn't you want to do a few write-passes over the entire drive rather than just free space? Wipe Free Space, as you said, writes over free space. Unless you don't want anyone to recover your files if they have access to your disk (e.g. you work for the FBI), it's pointless to use it. If you wanted to sell your drive, you'd delete all files, and then use WFS Piriform French translator Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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