Examkin

Question

Difficulty: Very hardData Destruction and Disposal Methods

An enterprise technician is tasked with decommissioning a hybrid storage array containing both SATA Solid-State Drives (SSDs) and SAS Magnetic Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) that store sensitive financial data. According to NIST SP 800-88 guidelines, the media must undergo sanitization to the 'Purge' standard to prevent data recovery via advanced laboratory techniques. Additionally, corporate policy mandates that all storage media must remain physically operational after sanitization so they can be resold to a third-party vendor. Which of the following procedures correctly complies with these requirements for both drive types?

  1. A
    Perform a high-coercivity degaussing procedure on both the SSDs and HDDs, followed by a single-pass full disk zero-fill overwrite.
  2. B
    Execute an ATA/NVMe Secure Erase command on the SSDs, and perform a high-coercivity degaussing process on the magnetic HDDs.
  3. C
    Perform a standard OS-level full format with zero-filling across all drives, followed by issuing a manual TRIM command to all SSD volumes.
  4. Issue an ATA/NVMe Secure Erase or Cryptographic Erase command to the SSDs, and execute an ATA Sanitize firmware command on the magnetic HDDs.Answer

Answer

Issue an ATA/NVMe Secure Erase or Cryptographic Erase command to the SSDs, and execute an ATA Sanitize firmware command on the magnetic HDDs.
Issuing hardware firmware commands (ATA/NVMe Secure Erase or Cryptographic Erase for SSDs, and ATA Sanitize for HDDs) purges all physical storage areas—including hidden, reallocated, and wear-leveled sectors—meeting NIST SP 800-88 Purge requirements without damaging internal drive components needed for subsequent resale.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze media types and sanitization objectives.
The target array contains solid-state drives (SSDs) and magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) requiring NIST 800-88 'Purge' sanitization, with the operational constraint that drives must remain functional for resale.
Purge-level sanitization protects against forensic laboratory extraction while maintaining hardware usability when physical destruction is explicitly ruled out.
2
Evaluate sanitization methods for solid-state drives (SSDs).
SSDs require hardware-based commands like ATA/NVMe Secure Erase or Cryptographic Erase because magnetic degaussing does not affect NAND flash cells, and software overwrites fail to target over-provisioned or wear-leveled blocks.
Firmware commands instruct the internal SSD controller to reset flash cells or delete encryption keys across the entire physical media.
3
Evaluate sanitization methods for magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) under resale constraints.
HDDs require firmware-level commands such as ATA Sanitize (Overwrite or Crypto Erase). Degaussing must be avoided because it permanently ruins the factory-written servo tracks, making the drive unusable.
ATA Sanitize overwrites or cryptographically purges all magnetic media sectors while preserving the drive's mechanical functionality and track alignment.

Key Concept

NIST SP 800-88 Data Sanitization (Purge vs. Destroy and Media Specificity)
Rate this question

Topics

Data Destruction and Disposal Methods

More questions from this topic