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ATA Erase

Posted by David Chen on Wednesday, 25 Mar 2020

Oftentimes Industrial and Military equipment manufacturers are keenly focused on data protection and keeping stored information away from unauthorized users. They require a feature that can delete all the stored data on the SSD in the most quickest way. While conventional, off the shelf, HDDs only offer command set that is compliant with the ATA command standard, Industrial SSD have the flexibility to create any "vendor specific", unique command that can perform any custom task. 

There are multiple ways that this feature could be implemented.  The simplest approach is by using a standard ATA Secure Erase command. Executing the command causes an SSD to transparently erase all user data. When this command is executed, all user data and the data management table will be overwritten and could be permanently retrieved. The amount of time that it takes to carry out this function is dependent on the size of the drive. For example, to carry out this function on a 512GB drive will take approximately 20 seconds.

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