How to Completely Delete data from SSD and HDD

[Tenma White]

I'll be selling my SSD and HDD soon, how do I make sure all the Data is gone and cannot be recovered? I already formatted it but some people say that it is not enough, anyone of you guys can help me out?

[dizmo]

Boot n Nuke for the HDD, as for the SSD you could write data over top a few times, but that's about it.

[Tenma White]

7 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Boot n Nuke for the HDD

Do I really have to do this?

 

or is it this one? 

[dizmo]

1 minute ago, Tenma White said:

Do I really have to do this?

Why aren't you downloading the free version.

[Eigenvektor]

14 minutes ago, Tenma White said:

I'll be selling my SSD and HDD soon, how do I make sure all the Data is gone and cannot be recovered? I already formatted it but some people say that it is not enough, anyone of you guys can help me out?

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/SSD_Secure_Erase

Formatting it should be good enough in most cases.

Quote

Update as of August 2011: Because an ATA trim will be performed by NTFS with Windows 7 or when formatting using Ext4 from mke2fs 1.41.10 or XFS from xfsprogs 3.1.0, the secure erase procedure is no longer necessary in these cases

 

[dalekphalm]

8 hours ago, dizmo said:

Boot n Nuke for the HDD, as for the SSD you could write data over top a few times, but that's about it.

I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure Boot n Nuke also supports ATA Secure Erase. If not, there are plenty of other utilities that do, and that's what I would use. Apparently some labs have done testing, and on an SSD, Secure Erase is effectively as good as doing multiple overwrites.

 

It tells the controller to force all cells to erase data (I forget the exact mechanism - I believe it has something to do with sending a voltage spike to the cell). And the entire process only takes a couple of minutes. It seems to good to be true, but with the way NAND Flash works, it does make sense.

[dizmo]

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure Boot n Nuke also supports ATA Secure Erase. If not, there are plenty of other utilities that do, and that's what I would use. Apparently some labs have done testing, and on an SSD, Secure Erase is effectively as good as doing multiple overwrites.

 

It tells the controller to force all cells to erase data (I forget the exact mechanism - I believe it has something to do with sending a voltage spike to the cell). And the entire process only takes a couple of minutes. It seems to good to be true, but with the way NAND Flash works, it does make sense.

Ahhh nice. I haven't used it in...probably a decade. Though I remember back then it was specifically not to be used for SSDs.

[dalekphalm]

5 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Ahhh nice. I haven't used it in...probably a decade. Though I remember back then it was specifically not to be used for SSDs.

It's changed since then. I don't even bother with Secure Erase on HDD's because it's already going to be fucking slow, might as well use DBAN and do a proper 3 or 7 pass.

 

But for SSD's, it's basically perfect for them. I've used it a handful of times at work (We don't get a lot of SSD's passing through - been hoping to change that over the last couple years), and it seems to work well.