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Data Recovery & Solid State

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the oops-sorry-you're-screwed dept.

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?"

3 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Secure erase by trainman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually my concern would be more the exact opposite, what are the implications for secure erasure of these drives? Before we could just open the drives and smash the platters if you wanted to be really paranoid. Now, do we have to make sure we find all the flash chips and ensure each one of them is destroyed? Are there other implications because of this flash memory for secure erase utilities?

    If your hard drive dies and you don't have a backup, I have very little sympathy for you. You should know better. Especially anyone reading slashdot. Let's get back to our NSA fearing roots and talk about how to protect ourselves with the latest in encryption technology. ;-)

  2. Re:Honk! Honk! by segfaultcoredump · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While it is true that the data can be recovered after multiple passes, what most folks forget to mention is the level of effort required to recover such data.

    Think hanging chads, but on a much larger scale.

    You get to pull the disks, and start walking them with an electron microsocope looking for the 'residual' images. Then you get to make a guess as to the 'bit' being a 1 or a 0. Then you get to start assembling a filesystem on top of all of that.

    Yes, it is possible, but it would take a very, very long time.

    Generally speaking, overwriting the data _once_ is enough to tormet your local law enforcement agency. The level of effort required is just too much for them to deal with the issue given the other things that they need to do. (rumor has it that in the old days they could just modify the firmware to shift the drive heads over a touch, but that trick does not appear to work as much with newer drives since there is not much space between tracks anymore)

    The reason that the Military/NSA/FBI/CIA want to actually destroy the disks is because even though it is _difficult_, it is still _possible_ to recover the data.

    Please note that for this to work, you must overwrite the actual sectors on the disk (aka "wipe"), not just blow away the metadata (aka "delete")

  3. Datarecovery of SSD drives. by rew · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work for www.harddisk-recovery.com .

    We will gladly reverse engineer the data-distribution algorithms that the SSD device uses on a case-by-case basis. We have done so in the past for several different USB sticks. We will desolder and read the individual data-holding chips and then reverse engineer their scrambling algorithms. We will then recover your data from whatever chips still work sufficiently to provide us with some data.

    The first time this will take us a few days extra. Expect about a week turnaround time the first time anyone sends us a failed SSD disk.....