I mean, that’s basically how I find the root cause of problems that occur in one environment but not the other.
Most recently was when a plasma desktop of any newly created user wouldn’t shut down properly, at logout it would hang for about a minute with an error in the logs stating that plasma-plasmashell.service was not responding to a sigterm, and was then ultimately force killed by systemd. On my main desktop, I didn’t have this issue.
By meticulously diffing plasma related config files, I found that the culprit was in ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc. Disabling a few system tray applets that I didn’t need (and that I indeed had already disabled on my main desktop) fixed the issue.
Trim does a pretty good job actually. Secure erase as well.
https://rossmanngroup.com/technical-reference/what-trim-does-and-why-it-destroys-data
Absolutely.
I’ve had to RMA defective HDDs, and was glad I didn’t have to think about what kind of data was still on the platters.
SSDs and HDDs don’t always completely fail either. I’ve had a case where the drive could still be read, albeit very slowly. Writes were not working. Kinda sucks if you wanted to empty the drive before handing it in for repair/replacement.