Where does information go when it gets deleted?

[ricear123]

So I understand that on a hard disk, when information is deleted it gets flagged as "over-writable". But what i dont understand is where the information goes. Lest say I have a 500 GB hard disk and it if full of my OS, videos and music and then i format the disk. It then will tell me i have 500 GB of free space. So my question again is, where does all that information go? And does it work the same way on a hard disk as it does on a SSD and/or Flash drive/SD card.

 

[popatim]

if you did a full format, it got overwritten by zeros
if you did a quick format, the file allocation tables, the pointers to all the file pieces, were recreated so that the file system thinks that all the space is empty. All the files are really still sitting there until new files get written there.

on an SSD you cant overwrite data. To write to a block of flashram it first has to be zero'd. this is what garbage collection and trim do. They zero out the newly 'deleted' blocks so the drives performance stays near peak.