Wear Leveling as It Relates to USB and SSD Devices - Essay Example

The paper "Wear Leveling as It Relates to USB and SSD Devices" is an amazing example of an essay on information technology. Wear Leveling is a processing technique implemented in a processing unit to restore and manage erasable space in storage media of a computer system. It basically enhances the quality of services for SSDs, USB drives with respect to flash memory. However, this technique is used in diverse ways according to the requirement and levels of flash memory and to improve its durability with respect to the memory space in the unit. It prolongs the service life of memory drives and caters to storage issues of temporary memory (Compardo et al, 2014, 309). SSDs and USB have integral flash memories, which can exhaust if the temporal data is written multiple times. Wear leveling technique enables uniform distribution of data writing transversely on other storage media in the system as well, so to prevent data writing in the same place and multiple times. However, Wear leveling always affects secure-erase-programs, as it permanently deletes and modifies data on storage devices. 

Likewise, SSD is fundamentally different from HDD in its structure and functions. It is motionless, can be accessed in less time and has firm resistance against jolt and vibration. However, techniques like wear leveling impact on forensic analysis of SSDs. As integrally SSD is programmed by wear leveling technique to delete all the temporary data. This makes it impossible to retain deleted data by the digital forensics, whether the memory drive was imaged or write-blocked. Secondly, SSD has this peculiar characteristic to modify its data automatically after it has been imaged, which inaugurates hash value inconsistencies and also becomes a cause of the corruption of data. Finally, encoded or encrypted SSD will never allow digital forensics to obtain any significant or meaningful data in the first place (Shimeal & Spring, 2014). Read More