Date of Award
4-2020
Culminating Project Type
Starred Paper
Degree Name
Information Assurance: M.S.
Department
Information Assurance and Information Systems
College
Herberger School of Business
First Advisor
Dr. Mark Schmidt
Second Advisor
Dr. Lynn Collen
Third Advisor
Dr. 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
Solid State Drives, Trim, Trim Enabled, Trim Disabled, Hard Disk Drives, Digital forensics
Abstract
There has been a tremendous change in the way we store data for the past decade. Hard Disk Drives, which were one of the major sources of storing data, are being replaced with Solid State Drives considering the higher efficiency and portability. Digital forensics has been very successful in recovering data from Hard Disk Drives in the past couple of years and has been very well established with Hard Disk Drives. The evolution of Solid State Drives over Hard Drive Drives is posing a lot of challenges to digital forensics as there are many crucial factors to be considering the architecture and the way data is stored in Solid State Drives.
This paper gives a very detailed picture of the evolution of Solid State Drives over Hard Disk Drives. We understand the differences in their architecture and the ways to extract data from them. We further discuss in detail the various challenges Solid State Drives pose to the field of digital forensics, and we try to answer contradictory beliefs those are 1) Would data be permanently deleted in a Solid State Drives destroying the forensic evidence required to solve a case? 2) Can data be restored in a Solid State Drives by using proper techniques and still can be used as evidence in digital forensics? In this paper, we talk about the introduction of concepts such as the TRIM Command and Garbage collection, their importance, and we set up an experimental scenario where we implement the TRIM command and try extracting data from different types of Solid State Drives. We compare and evaluate the results obtained through the experiment and try to analyze the uses of the TRIM command and its performance over various Solid State Drives. The paper also discusses future work to make the role of Solid State Drives more efficient in digital forensics.
Recommended Citation
Nimmala, Rusvika Reddy, "Forensic Research on Solid State Drives using Trim Analysis" (2020). Culminating Projects in Information Assurance. 106.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/msia_etds/106
