A company decides to procure only laptops that use permanent, solid-stale storage. Which of the following risk mitigation strategies BEST meets the company's requirement to ensure all company data…

Question

Options

• ASecure erase from the storage vendor
• BDegaussing of the entire laptop
• CFull disk encryption in the OS
• DDeep formatting of the storage

• A
  72% (18)
• B
  8% (2)
• C
  4% (1)
• D
  16% (4)

Explanation

SSDs use NAND flash memory rather than magnetic platters, which fundamentally changes which data destruction methods are effective. Degaussing (B) only works on magnetic media and is completely ineffective on SSDs. Deep formatting (D) and OS-level tools often cannot reach data in overprovisioned areas or wear-leveled blocks on an SSD, leaving remnant data accessible. Full disk encryption (C) protects data at rest but does not destroy it-without also destroying the encryption key in a verified manner, this is incomplete. The storage vendor's secure erase command (A) is designed specifically for the device's architecture: it issues low-level ATA Secure Erase or NVMe Format commands that reset all NAND cells, including overprovisioned and wear-leveled blocks that the OS cannot directly address, making it the most reliable and complete destruction method for SSDs.

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