SSD's are not Easy to Erase - I'm not recommending them for Patient Data Storage at This Time

I've been excited for a while now about the possibilities of SSD's (solid state drives) these types of hard drives have been showing up for the past year or so in netbooks and some other types of portable devices.

The benefits are that they have no moving parts. This means they consume much less power (which is why a netbook battery can last all day) and they also don't have moving parts to wear out.

No, however, comes word that you can't use commercial "wiping" software to reliably remove all the data. Basically this means that no matter what you do, some of your info may still be on the drive. Now, you can always remove them and destroy them with a hammer, etc, but if you've been using software to totally erase your old "regular" hard drives, it looks like that option doesn't work well for SSD's.

Here is the article in pdf format with all the details.