Conventional HD vs SSD?

Take a look at this, good info for help SSD's.

http://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/ssd-tweaks-to-increase-ssd-performance/

 

This one also is quite good.

http://www.thessdreview.com/ssd-gui...ptimization-guide-ultimate-windows-8-edition/

 

Wow this one is very extensive, I will try some tweaks, but I hope it won't break anything.

 

Well I got my new Dell laptop with a 512gb SSD 4 month ago and I applied most of these tweaks. Absolutely no problem so far and my computer fast like hell.

 

With prices falling heavily on SSD drives over the last 12 months, why wouldn't you have a 512GB SSD for the same price or less than a conventional spin drive HDD

 

Indeed. I'm switching to RAID10 with SSDs, plus dm-crypt/LUKS and LVM. Somewhat nervously.

At some point, I plan to search for stray plaintext on RAID members. So I'm wondering if there are tools for examining raw SSD contents. I'd be working with a test RAID10 array, so I could risk breaking stuff.

Any ideas?

 

My guess is that manufacturers do not make their own tools available (to the public anyway), and independent development of similarly sophisticated tools would be made difficult by non-open firmware/hardware details. I'd be inclined to try narrow searches looking for people discussing reverse engineer efforts, SSD forensics, and related very technical discussions.

At the end of the day you might have to just accept that the SSD itself generates/retains an unknown amount of information about the transactions it sees and it might be possible for some parties to retrieve/reconstruct that info. Making it imperative that the encryption/filesystem/device-driver software never writes sensitive info to the SSD in an unencrypted form. Not just file contents mind you, but also file related metadata, time/date, etc. That's something you should be able to accomplish with a bit of work. If you are fully open-source on the host anyway.

 

Thanks

As far as I know, dm-crypt doesn't write unencrypted data to disk. And /swap is a volume in LVM on top of dm-crypt, so no unencrypted /swap goes on disk. I suppose that some rogue process might manage to write plaintext to disk, but that (I trust) would require root.

Yes?

 

I'm still wading around in the shallow end of that pool.

 

Right. Me too. What I know is how to configure stuff that works. But I've never found the tools needed for finding leaks. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

 

Well, you could at least look for gross problems that can be detected by examining the normally host accessible portions of the storage device. Basically looking for unencrypted content (strings, data matching known file headers/formats, etc) where encrypted and random looking data is expected. I don't know of a tool advertised for that specific purpose. However, data recovery tools in deep scan mode and some string searches would seem useful. There could be unencrypted data that isn't possible to spot this way, but such inspection could give you some confidence that unencrypted data wasn't being written to the drive (and therefore wouldn't be retained within inaccessible areas of the drive itself).

Thought: In a redundant RAID configuration, you'd have the option to secure erase SSDs one at a time.