A company needs to destroy several SSDs that contain sensitive information. Which of the following methods is BEST suited for the total destruction of the SSDs?

Question

Options

• AOverwriting
• BFormatting
• CIncinerating
• DDegaussing

• A
  4% (2)
• B
  10% (5)
• C
  85% (44)
• D
  2% (1)

Explanation

SSDs (Solid State Drives) store data on NAND flash memory chips, not magnetic platters. This makes many traditional HDD destruction methods ineffective. Degaussing (D) has no effect on SSDs because flash memory is not magnetic - a magnetic field will not erase flash storage. Overwriting (A) is unreliable on SSDs because the wear-leveling algorithm spreads writes across cells, meaning old data may persist in unmapped blocks. Formatting (B) does not destroy underlying data. Incineration is the most certain method of total physical destruction for SSDs - it destroys the flash memory chips themselves, making any data recovery physically impossible. For high-security destruction of flash-based media, physical destruction methods (incineration, shredding) are the industry-recommended approach.

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