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wtallisyesterday at 6:02 PM0 repliesview on HN

To clarify: the host can issue a command to the SSD to securely wipe the whole drive including spare area that is not directly accessible to the host. The SSD controller in the drive issues erase commands to the NAND to erase individual erase blocks, with typical sizes on the order of 16MB.

The SSD controller does not usually keep a history of where older versions of a block of data were stored, so it's not practical to erase an individual file and catch any partial older versions that may not yet have been garbage collected.