• @[email protected]
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    7 months ago

    Not dissimilar to the dinosaur disk drive, “delete” equals “let’s just make this space available until something else comes along.”

    This is how delete works on all disks and filesystems, SSD too. It just is marked as free in the fs tree. “Real” delete is called secure delete and is slow.

    • @AdamEatsAss
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      217 months ago

      Rewriting bits to 1s or 0s is very slow especially in mechanical drives and is hard on equipment. Even SSDs have a rated max writes, if we rewrite all data every delete it will decrease the lifespan of hardware.

      • @[email protected]
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        27 months ago

        This is why is assumed they mark them to overwrite. Google knows a lot about what makes drives last longer, and OS and drive firmware makers have known for decades too.