CCleaner OK for SSD Drive?

[pdxhej]

Hello.  I installed a new SSD drive.  When I went to use CCleaner, I got a popup that said, as best I recall, that secure file deletion could damage the SSD drive, so I have been doing only normal file deletion.  However, now, if I go to use secure file deletion, I get no warning about my SSD drive.  I know there is debate about using defrag on an SSD drive, but is there any reason not to use CCleaner secure file deletion on an SSD drive?  Thanks. 

[Andavari]

I have two SSDs in my laptop and would NEVER use it on them. Anyways SSD manufacturer software has secure erasing built in using their own algorithms I'd suppose but those nuke all the data on the SSD.

[Augeas]

The concept of secure deletion cannot exist on NAND flash. Secure deletion is a process of overwriting a file's clusters (or pages in SSD terms) and then deleting it. A page on an SSD can't be overwritten, a new page is always used.

A normal deletion with TRIM will flag the page as invalid. It cannot be accessed by Windows or any software generally available. A secure deletion, if attempted, will flag the page as invalid, create a new page of zeroes (the overwrite) and then flag that page as invalid (the deletion).

So there is no difference between normal and secure deletion, except that secure deletion wastes time and effort and SSD life. Don't use it.

If you don't believe me (and you don't have to) run Recuva against your SSD. It will find many deleted file names, as they are held in the MFT, but all the headers will contain zeroes. This is TRIM doing it's work for you.

[pdxhej]

Thanks for your help.  If I follow this, the bottom line is to not  use CCleaner to clean an SSD drive, whether the deletion is "secure" or "normal."  Correct?

If so, some questions occur to me.

First, why does the CCleaner popup warn only against SECURE deletion of an SSD drive?  Why doesn't it just advise not to clean the SSD drive at all?

Second, if my computer had ONLY an SSD drive, why would I use CCleaner at all, except to use some of its subsidiary functions, like Recuva?

Finally, I've been doing normal file deletion of my SSD drive for a while now with CCleaner because I thought that's what I was supposed to do.  Apparently, I should not have been.  Will this lead to any problems or is there anything I should do now to "fix" this?

Again, thanks for the help. 

[Andavari]

You can use CCleaner (or any disk cleaning tool for that matter) on an SSD using the Normal file deletion method, which is what CCleaner has enabled by default. As long as you have Trim enabled on the SSD Windows will be able to automatically maintain it by occasionally using Trim.