Erasing unused blocks on USB drive

Question

I know that I wipe a USB drive from Linux by doing a dd overwriting the whole device with random data. This however may take a very long time.

Is it possible to do this faster (and still safely), by asking the drive to erase all unused space? That is to activate the flash erase process.

Edit: What I'm looking for is a way to do the electrical erase of all blocks in the flash. Blocks set aside for wear leveling should also be possible to erase.

Perhaps SD cards have better features for this.

First sentence is unfortunately wrong, due to logical remapping and wear levelling. This question has been asked and answered a dozen times already. — Ben Voigt, Jun 21 '23 at 14:30
Does this answer your question? Is it enough to only wipe a flash drive once? — Zac67, Jun 23 '23 at 16:57
That is very interesting answer, but my target is USB drives. Suppose that USB drives with these features can be bought. — Kjeld Flarup, Jun 23 '23 at 21:22

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 23 '23 at 21:47

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Actually I found an other solution, that secures my data. Being in a Linux world, I simply format the drive with LUKS before saving anything secret on the drive. This is actually similar to the SSD encryption in the question @Zac67 referred to.

There is a fine description of formatting a drive here: https://sorenpoulsen.com/encrypting-a-usb-flash-drive-on-ubuntu

And the best thing is that it works out of the box with latest Ubuntu. I'm sure that similar things are available for Windows.

answered Jun 23 '23 at 21:47

Kjeld Flarup

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Erasing unused blocks on USB drive

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