[problems]

If you use on-board crypto on most SSDs, there's a dedicated place for key storage and using the SSD's onboard wipe feature just changes the key and TRIMs the whole drive.

Most of these drives use cryptographic keys even if you don't use a password on the device. Think about it as an SSD manufacturer - what's the easiest way to wipe a drive? To actually go and zero out every cell on the disk or to overwrite a very small cryptographic key with a new one - effectively destroying the data without the need for any other write cycles to occur.

Pretty easy to verify - if you have an SSD with support for this, which most do now.

[throwawayish]

> Think about it as an SSD manufacturer - what's the easiest way to wipe a drive?

That's not the reason why encryption is always on. Flash endurance is; encrypting the data before FEC means that it will have a random distribution, which avoids pathological worst cases with certain workloads. You could also use a different (cheaper) scrambler than AES (like CPUs do [1]), but since encryption is a marketable feature...

[1] Which are also switching to using AES and offering memory encryption in current mainstream architectures.

[problems]

Ah, interesting. That's really cool. I guess it makes things easier for them and better for their customers in several ways at once.