I went to wipe the empty space on my Lenovo computer, and I got a message: ““Your drive is a solid state drive (SSD). Securely wiping a solid state drive is not recommended. Securely wiping it may shorten its life span. Do you still want to continue?”” Is this a serious concern, or just a general warning?
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This is a serious warning.
But like all risk and the common desire to have everything black and white, life is in the middle. SSDs data holes (the places that get zero or one) have a limited number use before they just cease to function. When SSDs are made they have a large number of extra data holes. When hole X dies, the system is smart enough to not try and use that one again.
Wiping a drive forces each data hole of bit storage slot to hold a specific piece of data - used to be the charcter “e”. I don’t recall if the letter was erased or not. To satisfy the American theory that more is better, this operation in most wiping programs can be repeated.
The folks who make SSDs, computers and operating systems all know about security and have information that is way more valuable then mine, so I choose to trust them. You might want to consider accepted their recommendations for using their products.
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Magnetic disks required repeated overwriting to remove all trace of the original pattern stored on them. SSDs don’t have that problem. But they have other issues.
I poked around, and this article was the only one that really did a good job of explaining it all.
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/how-to-secure-erase-ssd
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