Solid state drives are slowly taking over the market for data storage. If you are involved with electronics scrapping, you will need to learn about these devices. Broken hard drive? Switch to SSD- amzn.to/1Yuv9sG
He may have given that to you to destroy but some or maybe all SSDs have garbage collection algorithms. What they do is go through and wipe empty blocks. Just formatting it and leaving it plugged into power would be enough to trigger the garbage collection algorithms or it would even wipe a single empty block. By empty I mean a block with a file that is deleted and thus that piece of the file is no longer needed. You do not have to have the data connection attached to your PC for the garbage collection algorithm to work, the drive's firmware and processor will take care of this empty block cleanup internally. Now if you have a file you did not delete these garbage collection algorithms will not harm it. But if you formatted the drive even quick and left if with power it would wipe the empty blocks or even blocks that are occupied by a file that is deleted. If you don't believe me, do some research on it. It is something that can be daunting if you have a job which involves computer forensics or data recovery. Just google search it yourself or use what ever search you prefer if google is not your first choice. You can even experiment with this algorithm by writing a known series of files to it then deleting them in the traditional way which would involve marking their sectors as free for writing. Try it again after a format. Try recovering the files a little while after each erasure method and see if you find any data you recognize. Use junk data or make sure that you have some backups of it or if it is important data you don't want to loose. I mostly know about that sort of algorithm because I like to read about things like this. I was thinking about getting one for speed and it turns out data security may be another thing they are good for. Now before you tell me I am crazy or something else like that do some research and if you know people experienced in data recovery for any purpose, ask them about it. Get back to me via a reply if you would be so kind and tell me your findings. Many people would want to learn more about this and I am one of them.
