It’s probably nothing sinister, though.
  • Traister101English
    14•7 months ago

    There’s most certainly residuals, I’ve accidentally deleted then installed Windows on top of a bunch of my game saves. I found some random file recovery application and let it run for awhile. Guess what? Nearly everything was readable despite the fact it got wiped and then had a whole windows install.

    NAND also experiences minor permanent damage on writes. Actually clearing the NAND involves a write as the charge has to be forced out (a write of 0s)

    • @cm0002@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13•7 months ago

      This can happen when TRIM is disabled

      Here’s a study published last year I read that goes through this exact thing

      In consideration of results obtained from the experiments, it concluded that the behavior of Wear Leveling in different SSD manufacturers having the same storage capacities does not match. It varies based on the number of files, types of files, and sizes. The recovery of files from different SSD manufacturers showed different results. In all SSDs, not a single trace of any file found in disk format scenario(s). Whereas, some of the data recovered in the delete case and from only one drive. It clearly showed different behavior of data recoveries in format and delete cases. The obvious finding from this study is that the time interval of image acquisitions played a significant role, and the longer time interval supports few chances of data recovery because the TRIM and Garbage Collection process effects clearing residual data from the drives

      Non PDF link

      Edit: corrected links