Preparing Laptop for Sale with SSD
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Google ATA Secure Erase or the syntax for the Linux command hdparam to initialize a secure erase.
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I think that after much debate, the only truly safe conclusion for an SSD was total destruction.
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I don't know how DBAN or SSDs work. But if I have 100GB drive and I use a utility to write 100GB of data to it, by definition, all the previous data will have been destroyed won't it? It also won't significantly short the life of the drive, since SSDs are designed to be written to many more times than once.
What am I missing here?
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Have you looked at the manufactures tools? Sure i've seen erase options for SSD?
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@hobbit666 said:
Have you looked at the manufactures tools? Sure i've seen erase options for SSD?
It has a secure erase option in the BIOS. It took all of 30 seconds to do that.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't know how DBAN or SSDs work. But if I have 100GB drive and I use a utility to write 100GB of data to it, by definition, all the previous data will have been destroyed won't it? It also won't significantly short the life of the drive, since SSDs are designed to be written to many more times than once.
What am I missing here?
When the OS write to sector 102, that is based on the spinning rust type of addressing drive space. The SSD internally maps sector 102 to address space 234 for this write.
But now the OS says write this other thing to sector 102. The SSD internally maps it to address space 456 because the built in wear leveling says that space is next to be wrote to.
It marks address space 234 available.you have no control over where the writes are really going with an SSD.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@hobbit666 said:
Have you looked at the manufactures tools? Sure i've seen erase options for SSD?
It has a secure erase option in the BIOS. It took all of 30 seconds to do that.
If that was designed for SSD, then what it likely does is the same as the hdparam command that sets voltage on all the address spaces to reset them.
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@JaredBusch said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@hobbit666 said:
Have you looked at the manufactures tools? Sure i've seen erase options for SSD?
It has a secure erase option in the BIOS. It took all of 30 seconds to do that.
If that was designed for SSD, then what it likely does is the same as the hdparam command that sets voltage on all the address spaces to reset them.
It was. It's an M.2 SSD that came in the laptop.
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@JaredBusch said:
you have no control over where the writes are really going with an SSD.
Maybe I'm not explaining myself very well. If I ask an SSD to save 100gb of data and it is only a 100gb drive, then it will have to fill the drive and overwrite everything that was previously on the drive. Because it has nowhere else it can store the data.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@JaredBusch said:
you have no control over where the writes are really going with an SSD.
Maybe I'm not explaining myself very well. If I ask an SSD to save 100gb of data and it is only a 100gb drive, then it will have to fill the drive and overwrite everything that was previously on the drive. Because it has nowhere else it can store the data.
But I don't think you need to do that with SSDs. SSDs aren't physical platters and are more akin to EEPROMs (not the same of course) than HDDs meaning you could just reset them, there's nothing to be left behind as it's a chip not a magnetic device.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
I think that after much debate, the only truly safe conclusion for an SSD was total destruction.
Where did you hear that?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@JaredBusch said:
you have no control over where the writes are really going with an SSD.
Maybe I'm not explaining myself very well. If I ask an SSD to save 100gb of data and it is only a 100gb drive, then it will have to fill the drive and overwrite everything that was previously on the drive. Because it has nowhere else it can store the data.
Actualy, it DOES have space to write to that you have no access to. All SSD do.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
I think that after much debate, the only truly safe conclusion for an SSD was total destruction.
Where did you hear that?
Spent ages trawling through different forums, articles, a lot of them boiled down to
"We don't know if the data is truly gone, so just take a hammer and nail through the storage chips to be safe" -
This is one article I read on the subject in the past.
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The basic summary is that if the manufacturer gives you sufficient details to know how the secure erase is performed on their hardware then you can know if it is effective. If they do not, destroying the device is the only way to be certain.
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Actually, there is another way.
If you use full disk encryption from day one, once you delete the encryption key you don't have to worry about it.
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@Dashrender said:
Actually, there is another way.
If you use full disk encryption from day one, once you delete the encryption key you don't have to worry about it.
Any encryption can be broken. That is why the article I linked talks about getting verified information from the vendor.
