Disk wipe on SSD?

[yaiie]

The other day a program I've used a bunch did a random disk wipe on my ssd (I didn't even know you could do that to an ssd.) I've used this program a bunch and it's never done this before... I read online it was "bug" some people were experiencing that turned the option on.

The common consensus was it's bad!

How exactly would it cause damage? The commenters were very vague "it'll shorten the ssds life span by causing unnecessary writes."

I was thinking say you have 100gb of space to "wipe" and you do 7 passes = 700gb's of write space and that's how you "shorten" the life span? Or does a program like this actually cause damage?

Needless to say I deleted said program and will be paying closer attention.

Now i'm using AVG's tuneup program... It cleans old registry, can scan had drives for errors, fix windows mishaps, and more! It's also smarrt enough (under the defrag section) to have the SSD unselected. You couldn't even select it if you tried. Ultimately I decided leave the defrag off even on my HDD and i'll do it ever few months if it needs it.

Could you guys try to newbify the definition of writing cycle on a drive? I read a few articles last night and I don't quite get it.

Is it safe every now and then to do a registry scan / clean? Checks your drive for errors? It looks like the tuneup program has a lot of nifty features! is it safe to use them? Do I have to worry about hurting my drives? In particular the SSD. (I have NO intention of ever using a disk wipe again... That was 100 percent accident.)

What's a registry defrag compared to a regular defrag?

 

[pcgamer4life]

No software is going to 'hurt' your drives. Worst case scenario is that by wiping your drive, you did a bunch of writing to the drive which is referred to a P/E cycle in the flash memory world. The nature of flash memories is that each time you do a P/E, the cells degrade a small amount. Obviously the more writes you do, the more the cells wear out, which would lead to an earlier end of life.

Realistically, though, the rated max P/E cycles of drives aren't really concrete. Under normal use, even with occasional 'wipes' that you describe, your SSD will last well beyond its useful life (ie, by the time it dies a natural death, SSDs will be much larger, much cheaper, and much more reliable).

Long story short: don't worry, you didn't harm your drive.

As far as using a tuneup program goes, I don't use one. If you know what programs you're installing, then you shouldn't ever need any sort of automated cleanup... especially in the registry.

 

[Automata]

Wiping a SSD is vastly different than a conventional hard drive. Most drives come with an internal "secure erase" command and you should use this over manual writing, for a few reasons. The first is the most obvious and you stated it: writing a lot of data wears the drive down. The second is not quite as obvious. Most solid state drives have wear leveling where they rotate out which parts of the drive are being used. This process is all done in the background and invisible to the operating system and disk controller. To put it simple, writing data to the disk may not wipe all the parts of the disk.

For at least a few drives, a secure erase doesn't actually erase the data like DBAN (or others) would by overwriting every sector. Instead, solid state drives have internal encryption with the password stored locally on the drive. You don't have to type a password to access the drive, but your data is encrypted. The wipe works by erasing and regenerating the password. This works better than overwriting every sector as you get the data that was saved through wear leveling and the command is near instantaneous.

As for "tune up" programs, don't use them. They are going to do more damage than they claim to fix. What criteria do they use to cleanup registry keys or other files? How do they know what can be removed and what needs to stay? The main concern I've seen is that different programs don't even agree on what should be removed or running it multiple times returns different results.

 

[yaiie]

Wiping a SSD is vastly different than a conventional hard drive. Most drives come with an internal "secure erase" command and you should use this over manual writing, for a few reasons. The first is the most obvious and you stated it: writing a lot of data wears the drive down. The second is not quite as obvious. Most solid state drives have wear leveling where they rotate out which parts of the drive are being used. This process is all done in the background and invisible to the operating system and disk controller. To put it simple, writing data to the disk may not wipe all the parts of the disk.

For at least a few drives, a secure erase doesn't actually erase the data like DBAN (or others) would by overwriting every sector. Instead, solid state drives have internal encryption with the password stored locally on the drive. You don't have to type a password to access the drive, but your data is encrypted. The wipe works by erasing and regenerating the password. This works better than overwriting every sector as you get the data that was saved through wear leveling and the command is near instantaneous.

As for "tune up" programs, don't use them. They are going to do more damage than they claim to fix. What criteria do they use to cleanup registry keys or other files? How do they know what can be removed and what needs to stay? The main concern I've seen is that different programs don't even agree on what should be removed or running it multiple times returns different results.

Thanks for taking the time to write that up for me! Made me feel much better!!!