Secure wipe/sanitize SSD

yadnom

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 27, 2006
Messages
352
I'm planning to sell my laptop which has an SSD installed. What would be the proper/best way to securely wipe the drive? I don't think DBAN and such work for SSDs. I was hoping to keep all the OEM recovery partitions on the drive as well. It runs windows 10 and I've read to use bitlocker to encrypt, then format, then install windows and encrypt and format again. Would that work and allow me to keep the OEM partitions. I'm not too familiar with how Bitlocker works, drive vs partition etc... so I'll be reading up on that but just thought I'd ask others here as well.

Thanks!
 
I'm planning to sell my laptop which has an SSD installed. What would be the proper/best way to securely wipe the drive? I don't think DBAN and such work for SSDs. I was hoping to keep all the OEM recovery partitions on the drive as well. It runs windows 10 and I've read to use bitlocker to encrypt, then format, then install windows and encrypt and format again. Would that work and allow me to keep the OEM partitions. I'm not too familiar with how Bitlocker works, drive vs partition etc... so I'll be reading up on that but just thought I'd ask others here as well.

Thanks!

I'm not 100% sure you can be 100% and retain the drive. There are some DB and cryptography people here. They'll probably have better answers for 99.99%.

I've done "secure wipes" on some flash drives before and accidentally wiped some SD cards, and have still been able to recover some data.

Personally, any drives that I have I secure wipe 5x now then shred or chop saw them. If they're SSD's I take the pieces and burn them.
 
Assuming you are just wanting to keep some semi-professionals from taking a peek at your data, just wiping several times should do the trick. Assume the drive WILL end up on some super hackers desk for forensics and figure out if there is anything there that is so sensitive that you can't have it broadcast to the world. If that's the case, just mirror the factory restore partition over to a new partition on a new drive and destroy the old one. Do a factory restore and it should take care of it. That part is very dependent on the PC manufacturer but most can initiate the restore from a boot option.

If a simple wipe works, the Linux DD command does the job pretty well. It's not a government wipe, but it would certainly keep most run of the mill IT guys at bay. I just boot to a Ubuntu USB drive, run gparted to make sure I have the correct partition, then I run the dd command.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd# bs=1M

I am far from a Linux expert (I am sure someone can explain this better) but this is pretty painless if you understand which partition you are writing to - /dev/sd# where the # represents a particular partition (a, b,c,d etc). Gparted will show you the partitions and their designations so it should be fairly easy to figure out the one you want to wipe. I imagine you have a /dev/sda taking up most of the drive and /dev/sdb which is much smaller and likely contains the restore partition. BS is the written block size, the smaller it is the longer this whole thing will take but too big and you will be "skipping over" blocks that have data.

There is no feedback so you only know when its done when your bash prompt comes back (or you google up how to display the process). It can take all night for slow drives. Wipe a few times for super safety!

I use this often as I don't have anything particularly interesting to worry about. Drives with financial records or other important stuff get physically mauled (BTW, don't bend laptop platters as they sort of shatter).

Good luck,
EH
 
Modern SSDs have firmware support for secure erasing. Just use a program that can properly use this feature.
 
Don't use dd or software that writes 00 to the ssd as they can't wipt the drive correctly and just waste writing data

Fast way is just format the ssd with windows 7 or higher disk as format command is trim aware and will send a mass trim command to zero the drive out (not sure if diskpart clean command does same thing)

There is also the ssd software that can trigger the secure erase feature of the ssd that resets page and all space to factory new condetion (but quick formatfisfo reallr enough)

Ssd are not like hdd where data stays lingering
 
Good catch. I sort of didn't process that it was an SSD. If you are going to wipe the whole drive, be sure to clone the recovery partition over to another drive so you can do the factory restore.
 
Good catch. I sort of didn't process that it was an SSD. If you are going to wipe the whole drive, be sure to clone the recovery partition over to another drive so you can do the factory restore.

why bother , just make a windows 10 USB disk first then flatten the SSD and install clean
 
Its just family photos and what not that I didn't want someone to snoop on. I'll look at manufacturer software as I believe its a samsung ssd and have read on samsung magician software. Otherwise I'll just use the ATA secure erase and clean install Win10. Thanks for the tips.
 
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