Data Recovery & Solid State

theoverlay writes "With all of the recent hype about solid-state drives in both consumer applications and enterprise environments I have a real concern about data recovery on these devices. I know there are services for flash memory restoration but has anyone been involved in data restoration projects on ssd drives? What are the limits and circumstances that have surfaced so far? What tools will law enforcement and government use to retrieve data for investigations and the like?"

Comments

Re:SSDs have one infallible data recovery option

[jeffmeden]

-1, didn't read the question. He is NOT asking about how reliable the drives are, since he acknowledges that ANY media can fail. Instead, he asks about recovery options when there are no other alternatives, such as extreme disasters or criminal cases where data was intentionally lost. This is a good question, I look forward to constructive answers and the discussion that follows. Yours, however, is a dead end.

Re:Honk! Honk!

[tripwirecc]

That may have worked with old drives, forensics experts tell me these MFM/RLL things, but with modern drives and the used recording tech, it's practically impossible. But hey, keep pandering to these myths.

Re:Honk! Honk!

[Jagen]

That is a myth based on a theoretical paper. The principle is good, but you would need to know the starting voltage of each bit and exactly how many times that bit had been written to. Overwrite your files once, and they're gone, for good.

Re:SSDs have one infallible data recovery option

[JesseL]

One confounding aspect of trying to permanently erase things from solid state drives is the fact that most flash drives incorporate wear-leveling. You may not be able to over write specific physical sectors without just overwriting the whole drive several times.

Re:Honk! Honk!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You are wrong, in fact the small feature size of modern HDD's actually makes it easier in some cases as the smaller magnetic domains are harder to flip so even small changes in alignment will mean that recoverable data will be left behind. You are wrong. You should have cited the author's follow-up to the original paper, like I just did.

Here's the relevant part of new epilogue:

Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps a single level via basic error-cancelling techniques. In particular the drives in use at the time that this paper was originally written have mostly fallen out of use, so the methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-density technology don't apply any more. In fact, the same man has written paper that somewhat addresses the original question regarding forensic recovery of erased data in sold-state memory for usenix 2001.