I was reading the Veracrypt website and saw this about SSD's

Questions
1

I was looking at the best way to encrypt SSDs wether it’s drives and USBs and saw this:

So basically it talks about how this TRIM operation is not great for encryption. Now the way I understand it means that this will not leak any data or your password keystrokes or anything crazy like that, it’s just that someone with knowledge could tell that you used it recently for instance (correct me if wrong)

So I was wondering… what do you do about this?

From what I’ve read, if you do full disk encryption on Linux for instance with Debian or anything similar, it will turn off TRIM automatically. But what about an USB with Veracrypt for instance?

The not so great thing about turning TRIM off is that apparently it was additional wear on the SSD so that doesn’t sound great, however, if Linux’s LUKS disables it by default, then I assume they studied this enough and decided it’s not safe enough to do encryption with TRIM enabled.

Im just worried now that this will damage the drives or something, but I also don’t want to give up on losing any privacy.

So if I want to encrypt an USB with Veracrypt what are then necessary measures to take to do it properly?

2

Yes, disabling TRIM might reduce the lifespan of your SSD but I don’t think the difference would be significant.

By enabling TRIM, your SSD leaks ‘metadata’ about the encryption status. Whether or not TRIM is enabled, your data written after encryption is safe.

AFAIK, USBs do not support TRIM so no need to worry about that

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