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Depending on how the SSD died. If it was burned out or something like that there is no way in hell anyone can recover that data even if planet earth survival was at stake.
On the other hand if its a controller or software damage its easily recoverable.
As far as I know with HDD drives, when a broken drive is returned they try to repair it, depending if a specific component was damaged or whatever they change the specific component, they never check the drive (all companies have strict policies[usually law binding], enforced by the regulatory commissions in the country of question). That said you never know what an employee will do, he might as well surf all the stuff you have in the drive, copy it and release it on the internet.
That's why you need to keep sensitive information encrypted or archived with password, in the least case to keep it in a virtual environment that will only show the files based on the OS licence number.
I could guide you to erase any potential data in the SSD, but that would void the warrant.
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On January 18 2011 00:00 Nuttyguy wrote:
Well my SSD isnt working and i've sent a request to get it RMAd. Im pretty sure that the drive is dead
When i send back my SSD, are they allowed to read it if they can with their special tools? since i got some semi-sensitive information on it and i dont want some random person to be able to read it. Is there like some privacy laws or something?
When i said the SSD is dead, its not recognised in the BIOS of 2 two computers, so hopefully the SSD cant be read. It was working before until the PSU fried up and killed the mobo, is it possible the SSD can get fried as well? making it permanently un-useable?
EDIT Drive is a OCZ Vertex 2E
Seagate seems to delete the files before working on the drive so im not sure about OCZ
I'm wondering why you'd waste a perfectly good SSD on ordinary data.
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My opinion is that they probably RMA tons of drives everyday that they would never be bored enough to look at yours.
For the future, however, do spend at least a little effort in encrypting it. I think ubuntu allows you to encrypt some stuff almost automatically.
On January 18 2011 12:43 Ownos wrote:Show nested quote +On January 18 2011 00:00 Nuttyguy wrote:
Well my SSD isnt working and i've sent a request to get it RMAd. Im pretty sure that the drive is dead
When i send back my SSD, are they allowed to read it if they can with their special tools? since i got some semi-sensitive information on it and i dont want some random person to be able to read it. Is there like some privacy laws or something?
When i said the SSD is dead, its not recognised in the BIOS of 2 two computers, so hopefully the SSD cant be read. It was working before until the PSU fried up and killed the mobo, is it possible the SSD can get fried as well? making it permanently un-useable?
EDIT Drive is a OCZ Vertex 2E
Seagate seems to delete the files before working on the drive so im not sure about OCZ I'm wondering why you'd waste a perfectly good SSD on ordinary data.
My thoughts too.
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Could you call up OCZ and just ask what their policy is? You'd have to trust them, but they'd be able to give you the best answer. Maybe it's their policy to never check data, maybe they don't have any policy on it, buy trying to call to ask directly could give you a bit more information.
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On January 18 2011 00:36 orgolove wrote:
True story. One of my friends work in Geek Squad, and there's a colleague of his that goes through the HDD of every computer that comes by his way for porn and copies them for his use. Point is, don't expect any privacy when you send anything in for repairs.
lolz no offense to your friend but Geek Squad is a got damn joke. Give them a computer with a virus and they will spend a week just to tell you to replace the hard drive and charge you up the ass for it. I remember little less than 10 years ago my dad using their service.
I work a computer job right now. I have software that can read "bad" hard drives and pull up all the information from it. Depending on the condition of the SSD... it too can be read. So to the original poster... yes there are definitely ways that your data can be read.
*EDIT* yay my 666 post... >,<
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On January 18 2011 09:16 semantics wrote:Show nested quote +On January 18 2011 08:47 MisterD wrote:
windows passwords only prevent you from system access, they don't encrypt data. That's all still there, readable in plain text. The only thing a windows password secures is that noone can log in to your windows account, which is no good for anything, except to cause unprofessional data-snoopers about 30 minutes additional work. The little things deter recreational theifts anyways, why bother with the drive that takes a few extra steps to steal data from when i have 10 other ones that are easier. Anyways a user password on the admin account doesn't cost any performance and proves a layer of protection. I don't care about the 3 secs to type in to get to windows i only boot like once a day if not less.
Well but if you send a drive in for repairs, the windows password is just never ever promted at all because they attach the drive as a second drive only anyways. The windows password only works if the drive is booted from. and the hardware support won't boot from your drive, they'll attach it as a secondary drive. so the windows password just has absolutely no effect in this scenario. Your recommendation is not bad or wrong, just pointless in this case. That's what i wanted to state. You are absolutely right that an admin password doesn't hurt anyone (except yourself a little if you lose it). Just recommending it for someone sending a drive in for repairs is pointless.
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On January 18 2011 13:11 Sufficiency wrote:
My opinion is that they probably RMA tons of drives everyday that they would never be bored enough to look at yours.
That's the point. Even if they can look at your data, and i truly think they can with knowhow and special soft-/hardware, but they won't
It's completely safe to RMA that SSD, they will check what's broken and either fix it, or throw it away.
And they are bound by law to respect your privacy and the data. seagate and WD (if i remember right) offer a service to rescue the data and put it on a new drive and send the new one back to you. Even then no human being will read the data, they check if it's possible, hook up both drives on a special machine and copy that stuff.
My guess is that the big HDD/SSD companies get more stuff RMAd then they could ever possibly look at.
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On January 18 2011 10:38 thehitman wrote:
Depending on how the SSD died. If it was burned out or something like that there is no way in hell anyone can recover that data even if planet earth survival was at stake.
On the other hand if its a controller or software damage its easily recoverable.
As far as I know with HDD drives, when a broken drive is returned they try to repair it, depending if a specific component was damaged or whatever they change the specific component, they never check the drive (all companies have strict policies[usually law binding], enforced by the regulatory commissions in the country of question). That said you never know what an employee will do, he might as well surf all the stuff you have in the drive, copy it and release it on the internet.
That's why you need to keep sensitive information encrypted or archived with password, in the least case to keep it in a virtual environment that will only show the files based on the OS licence number.
I could guide you to erase any potential data in the SSD, but that would void the warrant.
A hammer could do that w/o any instructions
On January 18 2011 12:43 Ownos wrote:Show nested quote +On January 18 2011 00:00 Nuttyguy wrote:
Well my SSD isnt working and i've sent a request to get it RMAd. Im pretty sure that the drive is dead
When i send back my SSD, are they allowed to read it if they can with their special tools? since i got some semi-sensitive information on it and i dont want some random person to be able to read it. Is there like some privacy laws or something?
When i said the SSD is dead, its not recognised in the BIOS of 2 two computers, so hopefully the SSD cant be read. It was working before until the PSU fried up and killed the mobo, is it possible the SSD can get fried as well? making it permanently un-useable?
EDIT Drive is a OCZ Vertex 2E
Seagate seems to delete the files before working on the drive so im not sure about OCZ I'm wondering why you'd waste a perfectly good SSD on ordinary data.
OFC there are programs on the SSD, no need to state the obvious.
Ive sent a question about what they do about the data but they havent responded just yet.
Most people are saying leave it to luck/ windows password (like thats really gonna do anything)
i was mainly looking for experience about RMAing harddrives since theres nothing you can do since you need a RMA on a hard drive.
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I don't understand why you'd be worried about them reading your data. Here is a small list of different sensitive data types and what that means for your RMA.
Legal Porn - Who cares? They aren't going to file a report with your wife, etc.
Illegal Porn - Yeah, if they find it, you might get busted.
Company Secrets - Are you OCZ's competitor? Worry. Otherwise, who cares?
Government Secrets - If they seek it. If they find it. If they recognize it. Worry.
Financial Information - Everyone has this on their HDD. Unless you made a file called Credit_and_Bank_Account_Info_and_Pins.txt, I wouldn't worry.
So my question is, which type of data would have you so concerned that you'd rather buy a new drive if you had the money?
Don't worry! He's got your back!
![[image loading]](http://juliasherred.com/archive/scifi/captain%20picard.jpg)
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On January 19 2011 05:07 Obsolescence wrote:I don't understand why you'd be worried about them reading your data. Here is a small list of different sensitive data types and what that means for your RMA. Legal Porn - Who cares? They aren't going to file a report with your wife, etc. Illegal Porn - Yeah, if they find it, you might get busted. Company Secrets - Are you OCZ's competitor? Worry. Otherwise, who cares? Government Secrets - If they seek it. If they find it. If they recognize it. Worry. Financial Information - Everyone has this on their HDD. Unless you made a file called Credit_and_Bank_Account_Info_and_Pins.txt, I wouldn't worry. So my question is, which type of data would have you so concerned that you'd rather buy a new drive if you had the money? Don't worry! He's got your back!
shit tons of email address that are actually useful and the thing is that im not totally sure what other stuff there might be
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The safe bet is they can probably recover your data, it's almost always possible to recover an SSD or disk drive, the question is how much cost and effort will it take. Will they? Who knows. Unless there are legal ramifications for you if they read your data, I wouldn't worry about it.
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UPDATE
2 emails asking what they do about confidential data on hard drives and i get the obvious, 0/10 customer service
From OCZ
we don't do any data recovery. all defective drives are destroyed
all defective drives are destroyed
im going to post it tomorrow and just get it RMAd since by the sounds of it they must be busy with their 1 liner emails
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Yeah but what does destroy mean, my guess if ocz had any business sense would be to rip it apart test the parts and recycle the ones that pass grade, technically the drive is destroyed just not the the connotative sense, but just saying it's low risk either way.
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On January 18 2011 08:30 Myrmidon wrote:Show nested quote +On January 18 2011 08:05 hellsan631 wrote:On January 18 2011 07:41 AceOfBlades wrote:Couldn't you do a 7-pass military grade format on the drive before RMA'ing it? There are plenty of boot disks that would let you do that. See: http://www.dban.org/ SSD's don't run using anything magnetic, so once the data is gone, its impossible to recover (literally, everything is written to 0 like it never happened). You don't even need 1 pass, because the controller itself does whats called garbage collection (aka TRIM), meaning, it takes all the old deleted data and writes 0's to those blocks, so that when it has to be written again, its fresh and new. Don't worry about data issues. Your perfectly fine to RMA. As the controller is most likely dead, and the cells are already worn, they will most likely ditch the drive all together, instead of refurbishing it. It would cost them more then the price of the drive to fix whats wrong, instead of just making a new drive. Also, because the controller is dead, everything will mostlikely be corrupted so hardcore, that only a few grade S super hackers could recover the/any data. Unless I'm very mistaken, this isn't how garbage collection on SSDs works at all. Care to elaborate? Also, the controller dying doesn't mean that the flash memory is damaged. If you were to destroy a controller and replace it with an identical one, the new one would be able to read and write to the flash just as the old one did. The flash modules are pretty expensive and are worth recovering if usable. The majority of an SSD's cost is the flash itself, especially for higher-capacity drives. Regardless, I wouldn't assume that OCZ will read the data, though there's a possibility, if it still can be read. File copying/backup services often work very differently, as already pointed out.
Its slightly different then that, because the controller also stores the drive bitmap, which is where the data is located. Because everything is place in random blocks (data is spread out due to a wear-leveling algorithm), putting in a new controller wouldn't fix anything really, and the data is pretty much almost gone.
As far as garbage collection. For someone to write a block of data (ssd's use a 4kb block size i believe), that block needs to first be all 0's (blank). If the block isn't blank, 0's are written to it, then the data is written. This slows down the write a lot, which is why a larger cache helps. Also, this, over time, effects SSD performance dramatically (by about as much as 70% on older drives), so they came up with TRIM, (aka garbage collection), which when your windows 7 (and some linux installs, as well as a few other os's) is idle, it will go to each of the written buy empty blocks (a block with a file deleted, but the data is still there), and clear all of the data from those blocks. Usually, you can just leave your PC idle for like 15 min or so on modern SSD's and it will clear almost everything off there.
If you don't have an os that supports trim, you can force it through different tools, depending on the controller.
I know all this stuff because i helped a couple of companies with their SSD's during my time at college as a Computer Engineer major.
On January 20 2011 09:55 Nuttyguy wrote:UPDATE 2 emails asking what they do about confidential data on hard drives and i get the obvious, 0/10 customer service im going to post it tomorrow and just get it RMAd since by the sounds of it they must be busy with their 1 liner emails
They answered your question though, right? Do you want a page explaining that they destroy and don't recover data, with 17 legal documents you have to sign just to see what they do?
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On January 20 2011 10:23 hellsan631 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 18 2011 08:30 Myrmidon wrote:On January 18 2011 08:05 hellsan631 wrote:On January 18 2011 07:41 AceOfBlades wrote:Couldn't you do a 7-pass military grade format on the drive before RMA'ing it? There are plenty of boot disks that would let you do that. See: http://www.dban.org/ SSD's don't run using anything magnetic, so once the data is gone, its impossible to recover (literally, everything is written to 0 like it never happened). You don't even need 1 pass, because the controller itself does whats called garbage collection (aka TRIM), meaning, it takes all the old deleted data and writes 0's to those blocks, so that when it has to be written again, its fresh and new. Don't worry about data issues. Your perfectly fine to RMA. As the controller is most likely dead, and the cells are already worn, they will most likely ditch the drive all together, instead of refurbishing it. It would cost them more then the price of the drive to fix whats wrong, instead of just making a new drive. Also, because the controller is dead, everything will mostlikely be corrupted so hardcore, that only a few grade S super hackers could recover the/any data. Unless I'm very mistaken, this isn't how garbage collection on SSDs works at all. Care to elaborate? Also, the controller dying doesn't mean that the flash memory is damaged. If you were to destroy a controller and replace it with an identical one, the new one would be able to read and write to the flash just as the old one did. The flash modules are pretty expensive and are worth recovering if usable. The majority of an SSD's cost is the flash itself, especially for higher-capacity drives. Regardless, I wouldn't assume that OCZ will read the data, though there's a possibility, if it still can be read. File copying/backup services often work very differently, as already pointed out. Its slightly different then that, because the controller also stores the drive bitmap, which is where the data is located. Because everything is place in random blocks (data is spread out due to a wear-leveling algorithm), putting in a new controller wouldn't fix anything really, and the data is pretty much almost gone. As far as garbage collection. For someone to write a block of data (ssd's use a 4kb block size i believe), that block needs to first be all 0's (blank). If the block isn't blank, 0's are written to it, then the data is written. This slows down the write a lot, which is why a larger cache helps. Also, this, over time, effects SSD performance dramatically (by about as much as 70% on older drives), so they came up with TRIM, (aka garbage collection), which when your windows 7 (and some linux installs, as well as a few other os's) is idle, it will go to each of the written buy empty blocks (a block with a file deleted, but the data is still there), and clear all of the data from those blocks. Usually, you can just leave your PC idle for like 15 min or so on modern SSD's and it will clear almost everything off there.
Oh, thanks for the explanation then. I knew the location of data was randomly placed because of wear leveling, but I thought somehow that the bitmap would be stored on some memory external to the controller (even though that doesn't make sense for performance or any other reason). If that information is stored in the controller, then obviously the data would be unintelligible to another controller. It also turns out that I was confused about writing and erasing, because I thought writing worked more like it does in other memory devices. Flash memory is different.
Let me get this straight, so correct me if I'm wrong: SSDs can be read and written to only in 4 KB-size pages (or however large it is). The data is stored as a voltage in the floating gate, which can retain the charge for many years because it is electrically insulated. The floating gate is between the substrate and control gate and thus effects whether or not current flows between the drain and source whenever the control gate is activated, i.e. a specific voltage applied. SSDs can only be erased in larger chunks at a time, say 512 KB (many pages large).
The reason for the distinction between writing and erasing is as follows: writing can only change 0's to 1's. 1's cannot be changed to 0's in a write operation. Erasing changes everything back to 0's, such that the block is ready to be written with whatever pattern of 1's you need in the future.
+ Show Spoiler [actually...] +From a quick read, it looks like the fresh state is all 1's. i.e. the floating gate voltage allows current to flow between source and drain. Writing only programs 1's to be 0's, and it cannot change 0's to be 1's. But this is a trivial distinction, since you can always pretend all 0's are 1's and all 1's are 0's.
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On January 20 2011 10:23 hellsan631 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 18 2011 08:30 Myrmidon wrote:On January 18 2011 08:05 hellsan631 wrote:On January 18 2011 07:41 AceOfBlades wrote:Couldn't you do a 7-pass military grade format on the drive before RMA'ing it? There are plenty of boot disks that would let you do that. See: http://www.dban.org/ SSD's don't run using anything magnetic, so once the data is gone, its impossible to recover (literally, everything is written to 0 like it never happened). You don't even need 1 pass, because the controller itself does whats called garbage collection (aka TRIM), meaning, it takes all the old deleted data and writes 0's to those blocks, so that when it has to be written again, its fresh and new. Don't worry about data issues. Your perfectly fine to RMA. As the controller is most likely dead, and the cells are already worn, they will most likely ditch the drive all together, instead of refurbishing it. It would cost them more then the price of the drive to fix whats wrong, instead of just making a new drive. Also, because the controller is dead, everything will mostlikely be corrupted so hardcore, that only a few grade S super hackers could recover the/any data. Unless I'm very mistaken, this isn't how garbage collection on SSDs works at all. Care to elaborate? Also, the controller dying doesn't mean that the flash memory is damaged. If you were to destroy a controller and replace it with an identical one, the new one would be able to read and write to the flash just as the old one did. The flash modules are pretty expensive and are worth recovering if usable. The majority of an SSD's cost is the flash itself, especially for higher-capacity drives. Regardless, I wouldn't assume that OCZ will read the data, though there's a possibility, if it still can be read. File copying/backup services often work very differently, as already pointed out. Its slightly different then that, because the controller also stores the drive bitmap, which is where the data is located. Because everything is place in random blocks (data is spread out due to a wear-leveling algorithm), putting in a new controller wouldn't fix anything really, and the data is pretty much almost gone. As far as garbage collection. For someone to write a block of data (ssd's use a 4kb block size i believe), that block needs to first be all 0's (blank). If the block isn't blank, 0's are written to it, then the data is written. This slows down the write a lot, which is why a larger cache helps. Also, this, over time, effects SSD performance dramatically (by about as much as 70% on older drives), so they came up with TRIM, (aka garbage collection), which when your windows 7 (and some linux installs, as well as a few other os's) is idle, it will go to each of the written buy empty blocks (a block with a file deleted, but the data is still there), and clear all of the data from those blocks. Usually, you can just leave your PC idle for like 15 min or so on modern SSD's and it will clear almost everything off there. If you don't have an os that supports trim, you can force it through different tools, depending on the controller. I know all this stuff because i helped a couple of companies with their SSD's during my time at college as a Computer Engineer major. Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 09:55 Nuttyguy wrote:UPDATE 2 emails asking what they do about confidential data on hard drives and i get the obvious, 0/10 customer service From OCZ
we don't do any data recovery. all defective drives are destroyed
all defective drives are destroyed im going to post it tomorrow and just get it RMAd since by the sounds of it they must be busy with their 1 liner emails They answered your question though, right? Do you want a page explaining that they destroy and don't recover data, with 17 legal documents you have to sign just to see what they do?
Nope they didnt i was looking for answer like
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=192027
and OCZ didnt really say yes or no, since you have to guess what they're saying
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EPT
