Securely Wiping an SSD

[FShiwani]

Hi, so I plan on selling my PC with a 60gb Kingston SSDNow V200+. It currently has Windows 8.1 installed. I have come across some software for hard drives that erase it and then write useless data to it and heard it doesn't work like that for an SSD. How do I go about reformating my SSD and then how do I go about installing windows back onto it

[ShadowCaptain]

Hi, so I plan on selling my PC with a 60gb Kingston SSDNow V200+. It currently has Windows 8.1 installed. I have come across some software for hard drives that erase it and then write useless data to it and heard it doesn't work like that for an SSD. How do I go about reformating my SSD and then how do I go about installing windows back onto it

 

hope this helps

 

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-securely-erase-an-ssd-drive/

[slightlyjaded]

There is only one way to securely wipe data on any hard drive, and it involves a blast furnace.

 

If you're worried about your data your best bet is to buy a hard drive, and do a fresh windows install. I never sell an old PC with an existing hard drive.

[slightlyjaded]

A bit of background.

 

When deleting data on a hard drive, only the registry is actually deleted, allowing reallocation of the data storage space in question. The data is still there.

The data remains there until the sector is overwritten. When the data is overwritten it can be recovered, although this is very difficult, and very expensive.

 

The current best consumer product is actually an old american Department of Defence program that scrubs the file, by deleting, and overwriting the affected sector 6 times, This makes it incredibly difficult to restore the lost data. If a person has the appropriate tools, and feels like spending the time and money, then this data can be rebuilt.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

Just take out the SSD and put it in a USB 3.0 housing. Or put it in the new PC for a secondary OS (Linux perhaps?)

[Guest]

hope this helps

 

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-securely-erase-an-ssd-drive/

 

For SSDs, this is the way to go. @slightlyjaded is talking about hard drives. SSDs are easier to wipe.

[ManWithBeard1990]

Best way on Linux:

sudo badblocks -w /dev/sda

This writes multiple patterns to every byte on the disk and checks for errors to see if the drive is fit for resale. The original data will be gone.

[FShiwani]

A bit of background.

When deleting data on a hard drive, only the registry is actually deleted, allowing reallocation of the data storage space in question. The data is still there.

The data remains there until the sector is overwritten. When the data is overwritten it can be recovered, although this is very difficult, and very expensive.

The current best consumer product is actually an old american Department of Defence program that scrubs the file, by deleting, and overwriting the affected sector 6 times, This makes it incredibly difficult to restore the lost data. If a person has the appropriate tools, and feels like spending the time and money, then this data can be rebuilt.

Yeah. I have found this tool called DBAN or something, it seems to do exactly that, write useless info over the drive.

[Wild1145]

Not sure if its suitable for SSDs (Cant think really why not off the top of my head) but Eraser appears to do quite a good job from when I've securely removed files.