Is it safe to use Secure File Delete on an Hybrid SSD drive?

[tyfius]

Hello,

 

I've been a CCleaner user for quite some years now and I primarily use it to perform a secure delete (3 passes) when shutting down my computer to clean up my temp folders, browser history and allmost everything else that it's capable of cleaning, enhanced with CEnhanceer.

 

This week I bought a new notebook, which has a hybrid SSD drive. Yesterday I accidentaly bumped on an article that said it's not a good idea to use secure delete on an SSD drive because it can massively reduce the lifetime of the drive. If I didn't accidentaly bumped on the article and bought myself a full SSD drive I might have been doing this without ever knowing, so maybe CCleaner should warn about this.

 

Now my question: Does the SSD rule also apply to hybrid SSD drives? It's a 500GB + 4GB SSD, so 4GB is used as a cache, I assume by the drive itself. Which means there's 500GB that I do like to clean. I searched both these forums and some other websites but was unable to find any information about this.

[nodles]

Hey & welcome to the forums!

Not sure about the hybrid drive, but you shouldn't (and properly can't) wipe SSD with "normal" HDD tools/ways/software. It doesn't wipe/delete files & remnants properly or at all, and it might (or will) reduce the lifespan of the SSD.

There's a post/thread about SSD's coming out soon, containing basics (info & tweaks etc) about SSD and how to use CCleaner on SSD.

[TheWebAtom]

These Hybrid drives are quite new so technical information is scarce. From my understanding; frequently accessed files (I'm assuming system files like "pagefile.sys" would fall into this category) are stored in the SSD section. The files stored in the SSD should not be secure erased (due to Re-Write/I/O) limitations, however the files stored in the "mechanical" sections of the drive could be erased without concern.

 

Of course; the obvious problem I can see is identifying exactly where a file is located on the physical disk. Until more information can be found; it's probably best to play it safe and not run the tools.