SSD Discore - A Scoring Method for SSD's Data Integrity Validation Using Different Smart Attributes in the Digital Forensics Process

Solid-state drives (SSD) are replacing hard disk drives (HDD) in the majority of computer systems today. Because SSDs outperform HDDs in terms of efficiency, SSDs are now more necessary to replace HDDs. However, due to uncertain data integrity, SSDs are not forensically sound in design. The data on SSD is continuously changing as a result of Wear Leveling, TRIM and Garbage Collection, which makes data integrity verification in digital forensics challenging. The use of hash algorithms to validate data integrity is crucial in establishing the legitimacy of evidence gathered from suspect systems. In order to shed light on this matter, an experiment was carried out to gather data from an SSD in both user active and user non-active state. The data was then analyzed using the different attributes of Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) to ascertain the data integrity and by proposing a scoring method “SSD DiScore (SSD Data Integrity Score)”, which can aid in digital forensic investigation procedure.