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this might seem a very basic question but i have been thinking about this a lot. The thing i know about deleted files is that it doesn't really disappear from the hard disk. It simply get unlisted from sort of a data structure that contains the files and their info or it get overwritten(not sure). My questions are:

  • Did i describe it correctly at the beginning? If not please correct me.

  • Where do deleted files go physically? In what part of the hard disk?

  • if a storage device has a limited space(it certainly does), How can it contain an endless amount of deleted files along with the actual files in it?

onlyforthis
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2 Answers2

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On HDD (Hard Disk Drives/Mechanical drives), the space of a deleted file is only marked as usable after removing it, and its data (the bits and bytes) is still physically stays on the disk, until the OS decides to write some data over it (if you are fast enough, you are able to restore this data before it gets overwritten to beyond recover).

On SSD (Solid State Drives/NAND based drives), it's a lot more treaky to actually delete the file from the drive.
This article talks about a study, which concluded that it's nearly impossible to reliably delete data from an SSD.

Hope it answers your question.

Mike
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On mechanical drives, the space is marked as usable, the data is still there, until more data is written. On solid state, i believe that the file is just deleted. Correct me if wrong.

toasty
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