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posted by mrpg on Friday March 17 2017, @05:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the encrypt-for-the-win dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by number6 on Friday March 17 2017, @07:11AM (6 children)

    by number6 (1831) on Friday March 17 2017, @07:11AM (#480262) Journal

    This story made me curious about the physical properties and chemical resistance of "memory chips".

    Unfortunately for me, typing into Google:
        chemical-(destruction|resistance)-of-(memory|semiconductor|electronic)-chips
    and
        how-to destroy-electronic-silicon-chip-by-chemical

    gave me fuck all zero answers !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    The total lack of information from Google on my VERY CLEAR search terms is very very surprising to me. You are fucking kidding me right!?

    Surely I am not the first person in this whole fucking world to ever put fingers to the keyboard on this line of research!?

    I am starting to think that any topic which has even a passing resemblance to "anarchy" is being censored from the mass population.

    I am also starting to think that Google's is actively participating in this censorship.

    Yes, I got fuck all zero results using DuckDuckGo as well, but I give them a pass; they are still new and growing their database.

    But Google.....those cocksuckers get no pass from me; their robot has virtually indexed the entire fucking internet and their super algorithm KNOWS EXACTLY what I was looking for with those previous search terms!

    Nope, Google can not find one snippet of text, or comment on a blog or forum, nor anything in Google Groups saying something similar to what I posted here; nothing!

    I am the FIRST EVER guy on the whole internet to type out words on this subject<<<<<NOT.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 17 2017, @07:26AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 17 2017, @07:26AM (#480266) Journal

    Try "decapping IC" for a starter. Here's an example [youtube.com]

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @07:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @07:28AM (#480267)

    it's not google, you silly paranoid little person you.
    it's skynet that's deleted all the references to destroying silicon chips.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @09:54AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @09:54AM (#480321)

    The only commonly available thing that will work is sulfuric acid, which you can get from ACE hardware. You'll need an acid-resistant container that can be heated. Add the acid, then dump the chips in, then heat it. Do be careful about sudden splatters.

    That should get you down to bare chips. I think the next step ought to be fine sandpaper, but if you want to continue with chemicals, I suggest using concentrated dry pool chlorinating powder. Put it in the same tough container and heat the crap out of it. You can also get 48% hydrofluoric acid as part of a "strong acids" (misnomer sort of) kit from an educational supply place, which is insane because that shit is deadly.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @11:09AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @11:09AM (#480337)

      If you're gonna play with chemicals anyway, you should just go straight to FOOF, a.k.a. Satan's kimchi [sciencemag.org]:

      “Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90°K., a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred.”

      And he’s just getting warmed up, if that’s the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that’s -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng’s reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn’t react it with: ammonia (“vigorous”, this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine (“violent explosion”, so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.

      • (Score: 1) by DmT on Friday March 17 2017, @10:02PM

        by DmT (6439) on Friday March 17 2017, @10:02PM (#480655)

        Btw, the original pdf is easily found on yandex, but not on google.