I understand traditional methods don’t work with modern SSD, anyone knows any good way to do it?
deleted by creator
3 pass random data erase. If you are not going to use it again, a nice hammer.
For an ssd you’ll have faster and better results with veracrypt, delete the key then call the drives secure erase.
5220 was for media that actually gave the user real access to block level read and write. Nowadays even spinning media presents you with an abstraction.
Physical destruction. It’s the only way to be 100% sure.
Nuke it from orbit. Only way to be safe
A fellow Expeditionary Force enjoyer I see
⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️
A fellow enjoyer of democracy
*Presses b
deleted by creator
No. Most SSDs actually contain far more storage internally than the SSD controller exposes. They then even out the wear and tear of the flash memory “packages” by cycling through the various packages and, given there being more packages than actually exposed for use, this offers a level of redundancy so the device lasts longer.
Because of this, wiping the logical device (e.g. zero filling or writing random data multiple times) doesn’t actually guarantee every storage package is written to / overwritten. Thus data may still reside even after wiping (that can be accessed by reading the packages directly and skipping the controller which abstracts these packages into a virtual block device).
Some SSDs offer a secure wipe tool that does a low level wipe of every page or wipes out an encryption key and generates a new one but not every SSD on the market offers that feature.
From the company my org has used to decommission old hardware; an industrial grinder is sadly the most assured way to guarantee no data can be recovered.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
For secure data destruction, either pay for it to be done properly, or create your own way of doing it. A decent sized drill bit can do all the work for you, at the cost of a new drive of course.
This article covers several methods. Personally, I’d look for a BIOS based tool first, as that would be free and easiest. After that, the Diskpart Clean All command is probably fine for anything other than Top Secret data which a government based threat actor would be willing to put a lot of resources into recovering. If it’s just your tax documents and porn archive, no one is going to care enough to dig out anything which that command might have left behind.
deleted by creator
If running linux, what command should be run? Shred isn’t viable on a SSD, as it will only tear them down. Shred was designed with HDD in mind.
deleted by creator
if the value of the compromised data exceeds the value of the drive, destroy the drive.
So many people here responding with outdated misinformation.
deleted by creator
Thank you I’ve been reading comments all day to get the right information
Are you considering using the drive afterwards? Because “toss it in a microwave for like 5 minutes” is always a valid answer if you’re not worried about reusing it.
Presumably there’s a risk of damaging the microwave?
If you want to cook with it yeah, but if it’s a junk toy then it’s practically indestructible
Smash it to pieces, melt it down into a blob and drop it down a borehole at the nearest quarry
Encrypted volume and burn the encryption key
That’s better for prevention than after the fact for the wear leveling reasons others have mentioned.
This is how storage services attest to a secure wipe.
But I wouldn’t trust anyone else with said encryption key who knows if its going straight to the CIA or not.
For all average user requirements that just involve backups, PII docs, your sex vids, etc (e.g. not someone who could be persecuted, prosecuted, or murdered for their data) your best bet (other than physical destruction) is to encrypt every usable bit in the drive.
- Download veracrypt
- Format the SSD as exFAT
- Create a new veracrypt volume on the mounted exFat partition that uses 100% of available space (any format).
- open up a notepad and type out a long random ass throwaway password e.g.
$-963,;@82??/@;!3?$.&$-,fysnvefeianbsTak62064$@/lsjgegelwidvwggagabanskhbwugVg, copy it, and close/delete without saving. - paste that password for the new veracrypt volume, and follow the prompts until it starts encrypting your SSD. It’ll take a while as it encrypts every available bit one-by-one.
Even if veracrypt hits a free space error at the end of the task, the job is done. Maybe not 100%, but 99.99+% of space on the SSD is overwritten with indecipherable gibberish. Maybe advanced forensics could recover some bits, but 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!?! You don’t really need to bother destroying the header encryption key (as apple and android products do when you wipe a device) as you don’t know the password and there isn’t a chance in hell you or anyone else is gonna guess, nor brute force, it.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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?
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.
Right, I read some more of the comments and realized that’s what some of the “unreported space” is used for. Makes sense, thanks!
You fill up the usable space. Or the visible space. No one will disamble the device and read from the raw storage.
Then why do that when you can do a secure erase in seconds?
deleted by creator
That makes sense. Thank you!
Call the devices secure erase functionality.
here’s how to do it to sata and pata devices
I don’t do some of the checking and testing in that article, I just do —security-erase-enhanced and unless it fails it’s fine.
You could also encrypt the contents and delete the key.
This is the correct answer. Due to wear levelling, a traditional drive wipe program isn’t going to work reliably, whereas most (all?) SSDs have some sort of secure erase function.
It’s been a while since I read up on it but I think it works due to the drive encrypting everything that’s written to it, though you wouldn’t know it’s happening. When you call the secure erase function it just forgets the key and cycles in a new one, rendering everything previously written to it irrecoverable. The bonus is that it’s an incredibly quick operation.
Failing that, smash it to bits.
And if you’re hiding from a nation state … don’t trust that, smash it to bits and dispose of them at different trash collection locations 🙂
Microwave
Install all your steam library to full your SSD. Should do the job. Empty the disk, rinse and repeat a few times.
NSA requires the use of a industrial shredder that can grind the components into pieces less than 2mm.
https://ameri-shred.com/portfolio-items/2mm-ssd-solid-state-drive-hammer-mills/
If you can’t do that, you should incinerate the drive at over 700 degrees.
As far as wiping goes, a 3 pass overwrite alternating 0s and 1s is good enough as long as it’s done over the entire drive, not just the partition.
BCWipe is good enough for this
Dalvik boot and nuke.
If it is a large concern, then encryption will help. There are even drives with built-in encryption exactly for this purpose.
Otherwise, will with non-repeated data. Repeat 9 times. (A heuristic, based on something I read 10 years ago.)
Do not use repeated digits. Those are optimized out.
