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How do I wipe a modern SSD to prevent data recovery? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

75 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I understand traditional methods don’t work with modern SSD, anyone knows any good way to do it?

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[+] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

If you want to keep/sell the drive...

Fill up the rest of the usable space
Encrypt the drive
Throw away the encryption key/password
Hard format (writing zeroes to every bit, sorry if that's the wrong term

Is that the best strategy? Or is anything outside of 2 and 3 redundant?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

You can’t fill the drive. The drive decides when to use its buffered free storage blocks. It’s at the hardware level and only the Secure Erase command will clear it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Right, I read some more of the comments and realized that's what some of the "unreported space" is used for. Makes sense, thanks!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You fill up the usable space. Or the visible space. No one will disamble the device and read from the raw storage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Then why do that when you can do a secure erase in seconds?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

a) why the fuck would they go to that effort for a filthy commoner like yourself, and b) what are the chances that 0.01% of recoverable data contains anything useful!?!

Nobody is gonna bother doing advanced forensics on 2nd hand storage, digging into megabytes of reallocated sectors on the off chance they to find something financially exploitable. That's a level of paranoia no data supports.

My example applies to storage devices which don't default to encryption (most non-OS external storage). It's analogous to changing your existing encrypted disks password to a random-ass unrecoverable throwaway.