BCWipe on SSD drives

Can BCWipe securely erase files from an SSD?

Yes.

How to wipe files and folders from an SSD with BCWipe?

In three simple steps:

Delete a file/folder with wiping.
Wipe free space with the 3-pass DoE* or the Jetico SSD scheme
For regular operations (optionally) enable Reserved Space.

* - the US DoD, US DoE and NIST standards are only available with the Enterprise license for BCWipe. Contact us to request a trial.

What the whole issue with wiping SSDs is about then?

There is a misconception that wiping cannot be effective on SSDs. This is not true, at least not with BCWipe. A more accurate way of phrasing this would be: Conventional methods used to wipe selected files on HDDs are not effective on SSDs. Hard drives (spinning disks) allowed to identify which disk sectors exactly the target file had resided which then allowed a wiping tool to overwrite those sectors precisely.

This is not the case with SSDs. To compensate for the limited read/write resource of their memory cells, SSDs feature wear-levelling, a technology making sure the writes are distributed evenly across the drive and letting the SSD controller decide where to write the updated contents to, which will most likely not be the place where the older data used to be.

Full disk erasure is the technology that has been widely adopted to address that issue. It is understandable, that by writing to each and every available sector of the SSD, full disk erasure SSD tools get rid of any remaining pieces of the previous data.

The downside is that together with the unwanted data, the necessary files have to be destroyed too. It is highly inconvenient to need to wipe the whole SSD out every time a file or folder needs to be securely deleted.

Does BCWipe allow wiping files and folders on SSD keeping the rest of the data intact?

Yes. This is achieved by using the Wipe free space technology of BCWipe. Wipe Free Space is a method that is taking the best out of selective wiping and full disk erasure, allowing to securely overwrite all SSD cells without destroying active files.

How does Wipe Free Space work?

See Wipe free space

Why is Wipe Free Space effective on SSD?

Wipe Free Space fills the entire free available space of the SSD with a pattern of choice (Jetico recommends using the 3-pass DoE scheme for SSDs) including the cells where the target files or folders used to reside, also triggering native TRIM and garbage collection mechanisms that make sure every cell of an SSD is overwritten.

Does it affect the lifetime of the SSD?

Unlike other wiping tools, BCWipe features Reserved Space Manager - an innovation by Jetico that allows to save time, resources and reduce the impact on SSD lifetime by preserving a certain amount of SSD in a clean state after wiping it once. The recommended amount of free space to be left on the SSD is around 30%, which will allow to achieve better performance.

Can data be recovered from an SSD after BCWipe?

For the operating systems newer than Windows XP and the SSDs that support TRIM, even selected file wiped from SSDs with BCWipe's Delete with wiping are unrecoverable by software recovery tools.

Another possible threat is hardware recovery. SSD hardware recovery is an invasive destructive technology involving physically replacing the SSD controller with a re-programmed alternative one. This is more of a theoretical threat since this technology is very complicated and requires very rare expensive equipment and skills. Running BCWipe Free Space can effectively address this too.

What is the best wiping scheme for the SSDs?

Jetico recommends using 3-pass DoE scheme built-in in BCWipe for wiping the SSDs. By writing random data to the SSD, the scheme can address the issue with compression on SSD. Unlike for HDDs, zeroing or writing any pattern, really, will not be effective an SSD, because SSDs compress data and patterns are highly compressible. The 3-pass wipe is at the same time effective enough yet not affecting the lifetime of SSD that much.

Is there a proof that BCWipe had wiped the data?

The conventional understanding of proof for wiping originates from the times of HDDs. With HDDs, a way to prove wiping had been effective was to check-read directly from the sectors where the data used to reside to make sure those contained the pattern of the last wiping pass. Since SSD controller is preventing direct addressing to specific cells. This king of proof cannot be effective anymore. The modern concept of proof for SSDs is more empirical and is based on overwriting every cell of an SSD.