[Bglug] Secure erase of an SSD different from HD

[Andrew Howlett]

i’m probably the last person to figure it out, but just in case someone else missed it, wanted to share with the group.

sometimes a client wants me to securely erase their old hard drive. no problem. i boot with a knoppix stick, use the dd command to write zeros to the entire disk.

well, turns out that doesn’t work with an SSD.

see article here for an explanation

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-securely-erase-a-solid-state-drive-on-mac-os-x-1580603733 <http://lifehacker.com/how-to-securely-erase-a-solid-state-drive-on-mac-os-x-1580603733>

i paid $9 for the partition magic iso mentioned in the article. partition magic is a linux distro, fits on a 1G USB stick.

used partition magic to zero out a 240GB SSD (Samsung EVO 840). using the SSD internal command to zero the disk took less than 2 seconds. i used hexedit to verify some random blocks were zero’d out.


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