Case Study 2: Solid State Drives
Case Study
2: Solid State Drives
Amare Alemu
Strayer University
Dr. Albert Dominic
November 13, 2018
SSD
The most
important thing in user interface (UI) is how the system respond fast for every
inquiry they make. The fast the response time it gives them an ease and a
comfort in applying in that platform. The paper will do: rubric #1, 2, 3, 4, and
give a brief conclusion.
According to Englander
(2014) the author discussed the SSD benefits and examined as follows. First, it
is nonvolatile electronic integrated circuit memory. Secondly, it is like other
read-only memory but uses a different technology. Thirdly, it permits reading
and writing individual bytes or small blocks of data. Next, its small size
makes it useful in portable devices such as tablets, smartphones, USB thumb
drives, digital cameras, and music players. Further, relatively, it has immune to
physical shocks. Lastly, it generates little heat or noise. According to the
article, many organizations have understood the benefit. They are going to
shift their storage system to SSD.
Server-side SSDs are
already providing great benefit to a major Midwestern university. Replacing the
hard disks with SSDs in a Dell PowerEdge server resulted in a dramatic
performance boost for the school's Multi Router Traffic Grapher software. The
university's goal was to poll roughly a million network ports at five-minute
intervals but could do no better than seven or eight minutes using traditional
disk. With SSDs, the polls complete in less than 20 seconds, according to the
virtualization architect at the university (Sliwa, 2014).
Rubric #2
According to
Harris (2012), the author analyzed the major disadvantages and possible hazards
of SDD that it has a problem of longevity and cost. For this reason, many data
centers and techies use a combination of both SSD and HDD. One approach is to
use an SSD in a laptop and a traditional hard drive as external storage holding
music, photos and other files. This combines the best of both worlds -- the
ultrafast, random data access of SSD with the relatively inexpensive, high
capacity of HDD.
Rubric #3
Yes. This paper did
recommend that Delaware Health and Social Services and DAV should conditionally
consider SSD for their organizations. The rationale behind is: 1. a
technologist supervisor at Delaware Health and Social Services, said he may
choose solid-state drives
(SSDs) if the applications that the state must deploy to
comply with recent health-care legislation push the limits of the existing
systems. 2. an operations manager at Disabled American Veterans, a nonprofit
organization headquartered in Cold Spring, Ky., might choose SAN-based
solid-state storage at the time of its
next upgrade if the cost isn't overly prohibitive (Sliwa, 2012).
Rubric #4
No. It is not difficult
for computer forensic personnel to examine. Several years ago, SSD introduced a
challenge to digital forensic specialists. Forensic acquisition of computers
equipped with SSD storage became very different compared to acquisition of
traditional hard drives. Instead of straightforward and predictable recovery of
evidence, we are in the waters of stochastic forensics with SSD drives, where
nothing can be assumed as a given. With even the most recent publications not
going beyond introducing the TRIM command and making a conclusion on SSD
self-corrosion, it has been common knowledge – and a common misconception, –
that deleted evidence cannot be extracted from TRIM-enabled SSD drives, due to
the operation of background garbage collection. However, there are so many
exceptions that they themselves become a rule. TRIM does not engage in most
RAID environments or on external SSD drives attached as a USB enclosure or
connected via a FireWire port. TRIM does not function in a NAS. Older versions
of Windows do not support TRIM. In Windows, TRIM is not engaged on file systems
other than New Technology File System (NTFS). There are specific considerations
for encrypted volumes stored on SSD drives, as various crypto containers
implement vastly different methods of handling SSD TRIM commands (Belkasoft,
2014). On contrary, according to Law Enforcement Cyber Center (2015) the author
discussed that Wear leveling is a concern for forensic examiners for two
reasons. First, examiners may get a different hash value each time they image a
SSD. Hash values are a mathematical algorithm represented by a string of
numbers and letters that are unique to a set of data, much like a digital
fingerprint. Forensic examiners use hash values to verify they have an exact,
bit for bit, copy of the original data prior to analysis. The original hash
value of the data, and the copy, should be the same. Secondly, an examiner will
find it difficult to forensically recover data such as deleted files. The
valuable data can appear at any location in the memory array instead of where
it should be due to wear leveling and over provisioning. Thankfully, research
is currently underway to attempt to resolve these issues. The Department of
Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, Cyber Security Division
is funding researchers to address this. Several solutions have been found, but
none with real world practicality yet.
Conclusion
The paper did answer
rubric #1, 2, 3, and 4 accordingly.
References
Belkasoft. (2014). Recovering
Evidence from SSD Drives in 2014: Understanding
TRIM,
Garbage Collection and Exclusions. Retrieved on 11/11/2018
from
https://articles.forensicfocus.com/2014/09/23/recovering-evidence-from-ssd-drives-in-2014-understanding-trim-garbage-collection-and-exclusions/
Englander, I. (2014). The Architecture of Computer Hardware,
System Software,
and Networking: An IT Approach 5th
Edition. John Wiley and Sons, 2014.
Harris, W. (2012). How Solid-state Drives Work. Retrieved on
11/11/2018
from https://computer.howstuffworks.com/solid-state-drive4.htm
Law Enforcement Cyber Center (2015). SSD: Issues and
Challenges.
Retrieved on 11/11/2018
from http://www.iacpcybercenter.org/solid-state-drives-ssd-issues-and-challenges/
Sliwa, C. (2012). Enterprise IT Shops Choose SSD… Retrieved
on 11/11/2018
from https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/feature/Enterprise-IT-shops-now-choose-SSD-storage
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