Date of Award
5-2020
Culminating Project Type
Starred Paper
Degree Name
Information Assurance: M.S.
Department
Information Assurance and Information Systems
College
Herberger School of Business
First Advisor
Mark B. Schmidt
Second Advisor
Lynn Collen
Third Advisor
Sneh Kalia
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Keywords and Subject Headings
Digital Forensics, SSD Forensics, HDD Forensics, SSD vs HDD, Data Recovery, SSD Autopsy
Abstract
The technological industry is growing at an unprecedented rate; to adequately evaluate this shift in the fast-paced industry, one would first need to deliberate on the differences between the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and Solid-State Drive (SSD). HDD is a hard disk drive that was conventionally used to store data, whereas SSD is a more modern and compact substitute; SSDs comprises of flash memory technology, which is the modern-day method of storing data. Though the inception of data storage began with HDD, they proved to be less accessible and stored less data as compared to the present-day SSDs, which can easily store up to 1 Terabyte in a minuscule chip-size frame. Hence, SSDs are more convenient and user-friendly, where, in contrast, HDDs often require some degree of technical knowledge. However, since SSDs are still a relatively new phenomenon, it has proved to create myriads of problems in the digital forensics department. Since, SSDs are still a more modern concept, the tools that digital forensics employ to investigate evidence obtained from HDDs are not proving to be as efficient; this is primarily due to the fact that data in flash memory drives can only be written if the data unit or data block is erased, ergo, an erase operation occurs every time before something is written into the flash memory. Therefore, the aim of this research is to critically analyze the results obtained by running forensic tools on an HDD and SSD; the results would pertain to the image generated from the HDD and SSD.
Recommended Citation
Kondam, Varun Reddy, "Comparing SSD Forensics with HDD Forensics" (2020). Culminating Projects in Information Assurance. 105.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/msia_etds/105
