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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @06:08AM
HDs are not worth shredding unless you are just being lazy.
Name 1 company or 3 letter org that can recover a drive where someone has done this.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
or
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda
If you are feeling paranoid do it twice.
They do not exist. There was 1 paper in the 90s about MFM type drives. None since. No one offers the service. They have some success if you only wiped out some of the metadata and they can guess the file types. But a full wipe with zeros is enough.
SSD on the other hand. They like to hide data away in extra sectors extra. Yeah shred them, or spend a few mins with a hammer and just shatter the chips, or just take a drill to each chip. There are rumors you could take a heatgun to it if you can get them hot enough. You may be able to zero out some drives. But if they have gone write protect because of EOL issues forget it. You are going to have to physically destroy it.