Selling an old SSD? Be careful how you deal with wiping the drive

By Darren Allan

If you’re getting rid of an old drive – by either selling it (or giving it away) to somebody else, or recycling it – then you’re hopefully aware that you need to securely destroy all the data on that drive. What you might not be aware of are some critical differences between doing this with a hard disk and an SSD.

As Backblaze discussed in a recent blog post, there are physical methods of destroying a hard disk which simply don’t work with a solid-state drive. Putting an HDD next to a large magnet will almost certainly wipe it, but it won’t have any effect on an SSD.

Similarly, drilling multiple holes in a hard drive to shatter the platters inside might work fine to destroy that device, but it won’t do in the case of an SSD – because the latter is a series of memory chips, and the holes you make may only destroy some of those chips, leaving data still readable on others.

So, you might think: simply erase all the data securely by formatting and rewriting garbage data over the whole drive (to ensure that all files are actually deleted, not just marked as deleted but …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components