Will DBAN kill an SSD?

[TheGermanEngie]

Hi LTT -

 

So I've DBAN'd this SSD I've had because a windows installation was acting funky. I then realized that DBANing zeroes drives very slowly and SSDs have limited write cycles. Does using DBAN dramatically shorten the lifespan of SSDs if repeatedly wiped?

 

Note: Unrelated, but my SSD (Crucial MX300 256GB) from the factory has 43 bad sectors. Not sure if they're affected as well during the DBAN..?

[sazrocks]

That wasn't a great thing to do and was pretty unnecessary. You've probably reduced the write lifespan, but that's done now. Be more careful in the future.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Yea it puts some writes on it, but these drives can handle 100's of tb, and you wrote .25 tb to it, you can do this hundreds of times and it will be fine.

 

 

In the future, just make a new partition table, no need to wipe it. If you want to wipe, use secure earse.

[Razor Blade]

IMO unless there is sensitive information on a drive you wish to sell or get rid of without destroying, DBAN is completely unnecessary.

 

Yes it is very likely DBAN shortened the lifespan of your SSD depending on the method and how many passes you chose to do.

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, Razor Blade said:

MO unless there is sensitive information on a drive you wish to sell or get rid of without destroying, DBAN is completely unnecessary.

and if there is sensitive data, dban isn't the best solution. Use the secure erase function on the drive. Almost all modern drives encrypt all data on the drive, and the secure erase function just makes a new key and deletes the old one. Doing a overwrite can be recovered due to how wearleveling works on ssds.

[Razor Blade]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

and if there is sensitive data, dban isn't the best solution. Use the secure erase function on the drive. Almost all modern drives encrypt all data on the drive, and the secure erase function just makes a new key and deletes the old one. Doing a overwrite can be recovered due to how wearleveling works on ssds.

That is good to know, you can probably tell most of my knowledge on the subject is a bit old school...

[Tabs]

18 minutes ago, Razor Blade said:

That is good to know, you can probably tell most of my knowledge on the subject is a bit old school...

I totally forgot DBAN was still a thing, all of my SATA drives also support ATA Secure Erase. Hasn't Secure Erase been a pretty common thing for at least the last 10+ years? It was definitely around before SSD's became mainstream, and I got my first SSD in 2008. When you're looking at tens of hours to erase a multi-terabyte hard drive nowadays, versus about 3 minutes to issue the secure erase command to destroy and recreate an encryption key, even the mechanical wear on a spinning disk gets taken out of the picture.

 

Still, yeah, write amplification on modern drives is pretty low. If you had an early SSD, like one based on ASMedia or Indilinx controllers, you'd have write amplification factors of up to 100x, meaning 250GB DBAN could be over 20 terabytes of actual NAND writes. Definitely a bad idea. Modern drives fare better, but still a terrible idea when there are alternatives available that are more effective and safer on the hardware.

 

We live and learn eh?