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How do you destroy an SSD?
First, let's focus on some "dont's." These are tried and true methods used to make sure that your data is unrecoverable from spinning hard disk drives. But these don't carry over to the SSD world.
Degaussing – applying a very strong magnet – has been an accepted method for erasing data off of magnetic media like spinning hard drives for decades. But it doesn't work on SSDs. SSDs don't store data magnetically, so applying a strong magnetic field won't do anything.
Spinning hard drives are also susceptible to physical damage, so some folks take a hammer and nail or even a drill to the hard drive and pound holes through the top. That's an almost surefire way to make sure your data won't be read by anyone else. But inside an SSD chassis that looks like a 2.5-inch hard disk drive is actually just a series of memory chips. Drilling holes into the case may not do much, or may only damage a few of the chips. So that's off the table too.
Erasing free space or reformatting a drive by rewriting it zeroes is an effective way to clear data off on a hard drive, but not so much on an SSD. In fact, in a recent update to its Mac Disk Utility, Apple removed the secure erase feature altogether because they say it isn't necessary. So what's the best way to make sure your data is unrecoverable?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 17 2017, @06:02AM (2 children)
then why not a tried and true method that works on HHDs, deleting everything then filling the drive with random garbage? For good measure, erase and fill twice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @06:18AM
Erasing free space or reformatting a drive by rewriting it zeroes is an effective way to clear data off on a hard drive, but not so much on an SSD.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday March 17 2017, @08:01AM
To expand on ACs comment - SSDs typically incorporate a fair sized buffer of reserved capacity with which to silently replace any failing cells (e.g. a 256GB SSD may actually contain 300GB of capacity). Those reserve cells cannot be directly addressed - as far as the computer is concerned they don't exist, but they may be cycled through by the SSD's internal wear leveling algorithm and thus potentially contain sensitive data.
In the extreme case, if that sensitive data was in a cell that was just "retired" because it's not sufficiently reliable any more, then there will no longer be any way to access it through the normal drive interface - rewrite the drive a hundred times, and that cell will still never be overwritten, because it's already been taken out of circulation by the wear leveling algorithm. But remove the containing chip from the SSD, and that "retired" cell will still be read just fine by a dedicated chip reader.