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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 VLM on Friday March 17 2017, @11:59AM
I have a data center buddy who says this is SOP for them because if the NSA/CIA/KGB can freely decrypt AES or whatever they use, then the IT world has a bigger problem than one little boutique data center. If there's no way the key can be on the disk, you can just torrent upload the encrypted FS without the key and nothing will happen. Key mgmt is a PITA. No, everything isn't encrypted with "Password1"
In the modern world its all NAS virtual disks so speed is "infinite" because of striping and replicating and throwing money at the problem so the mapping isn't as simple as the old days of one drive/one computer. This depends on data safety issues, theres not much I can do with a 1/16th strip of someone's copy of /bin/ls thats full disk encrypted anyway, but if I had 1/16th of the credit card numbers in some database I could have a real good time if there's more than 16 or so CC in the database...
This also fits in well with virtual images, oh FDE costs you 10% more CPU so what you turn the dial on CPU allocation and now you got 10% more so STFU about IO bandwidth.
I have no idea where this lives on the spectrum of "good enough for hello world" and top of the line PCI/DSS and surely he wouldn't tell me if I asked anyway so I'm not going to bother.
WRT device destruction I've heard weird stories from people about thermite is too messy and steam explosions are dangerous and scatter undamaged parts so thats purely tactical in the field and professionals use recycling grinders that turn chips and a lot of kilowatt hours into what amounts to dust, or plasma cutters that turn chips and a lot of kilowatt hours into vapor. Plasma cutter operators are already quite used to good ventilation, I remember some saying about you only cut galvanized steel one time without good ventilation as the flu-like zinc poisoning symptoms are quite memorable and RoHS means essentially all SSD are lead-free.