I understand traditional methods don’t work with modern SSD, anyone knows any good way to do it?
Physical destruction. It’s the only way to be 100% sure.
Nuke it from orbit. Only way to be safe
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A fellow enjoyer of democracy
*Presses b
A fellow Expeditionary Force enjoyer I see
For secure data destruction, either pay for it to be done properly, or create your own way of doing it. A decent sized drill bit can do all the work for you, at the cost of a new drive of course.
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No. Most SSDs actually contain far more storage internally than the SSD controller exposes. They then even out the wear and tear of the flash memory “packages” by cycling through the various packages and, given there being more packages than actually exposed for use, this offers a level of redundancy so the device lasts longer.
Because of this, wiping the logical device (e.g. zero filling or writing random data multiple times) doesn’t actually guarantee every storage package is written to / overwritten. Thus data may still reside even after wiping (that can be accessed by reading the packages directly and skipping the controller which abstracts these packages into a virtual block device).
Some SSDs offer a secure wipe tool that does a low level wipe of every page or wipes out an encryption key and generates a new one but not every SSD on the market offers that feature.
From the company my org has used to decommission old hardware; an industrial grinder is sadly the most assured way to guarantee no data can be recovered.
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If it’s really an issue where “if the data on this SSD falls into the wrong hands, lives will be ruined” sort of thing, my favorite data security tool for this job is a bench grinder. Difficult to put the data back together when the flash chips are powder scattered throughout 14 different shop surfaces and at least two lungs.
I prefer thermite. Recover my data from a messy contaminated slag heap.
Be careful with lung butter though. Been betrayed before
A special feature known as SSD secure erase. The easiest OS-independent way is probably via CMOS setup – modern BIOSes can send secure erase to NVM Express SSDs and possibly SATA SSDs.
Did this already, it took 1 second for a 2TB drive. Would you trust that?
Most SSD/flash secure erase methods involve the storage having full disk encryption enabled, and simply destroying the encryption key. Without the encryption key the data can’t be deciphered even with the correct password, as the password was only used to encrypt the encryption key itself. This is why you can “factory reset” an iPhone or Android in seconds.
It is the only approved method for data destruction for the several banks and government agencies I support. If they trust it, I trust it.
I have checked a couple of times out of curiosity, after a secure erase the drive is as clean as if it had been DBANed. Sometimes things are standards because they work properly.
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Thanks for this informative answer. Then it would make sense that it took only 1 second, then again, I have a modern Asus motherboard (AM5) with a Western Digital NVMe drive, and that drive isn’t listed as Secure Erase compatible on Asus motherboard. I will download the WD dashboard and do it that way, I didn’t know it existed before I posted this question.
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TEMU/Wish/Aliexpress SSD
I wouldn’t trust any computer part from those places.
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Encrypted volume and burn the encryption key
This is how storage services attest to a secure wipe.
But I wouldn’t trust anyone else with said encryption key who knows if its going straight to the CIA or not.
That’s better for prevention than after the fact for the wear leveling reasons others have mentioned.
Does it have to be from orbit?
What if the drive is not on a planet?
Then you need to aim really well and time your orbit
Call the devices secure erase functionality.
here’s how to do it to sata and pata devices
I don’t do some of the checking and testing in that article, I just do —security-erase-enhanced and unless it fails it’s fine.
You could also encrypt the contents and delete the key.
This is the correct answer. Due to wear levelling, a traditional drive wipe program isn’t going to work reliably, whereas most (all?) SSDs have some sort of secure erase function.
It’s been a while since I read up on it but I think it works due to the drive encrypting everything that’s written to it, though you wouldn’t know it’s happening. When you call the secure erase function it just forgets the key and cycles in a new one, rendering everything previously written to it irrecoverable. The bonus is that it’s an incredibly quick operation.
Failing that, smash it to bits.
And if you’re hiding from a nation state … don’t trust that, smash it to bits and dispose of them at different trash collection locations 🙂
Are you considering using the drive afterwards? Because “toss it in a microwave for like 5 minutes” is always a valid answer if you’re not worried about reusing it.
Presumably there’s a risk of damaging the microwave?
If you want to cook with it yeah, but if it’s a junk toy then it’s practically indestructible
For all average user requirements that just involve backups, PII docs, your sex vids, etc (e.g. not someone who could be persecuted, prosecuted, or murdered for their data) your best bet (other than physical destruction) is to encrypt every usable bit in the drive.
- Download veracrypt
- Format the SSD as exFAT
- Create a new veracrypt volume on the mounted exFat partition that uses 100% of available space (any format).
- open up a notepad and type out a long random ass throwaway password e.g.
$-963,;@82??/@;!3?$.&$-,fysnvefeianbsTak62064$@/lsjgegelwidvwggagabanskhbwugVg, copy it, and close/delete without saving. - paste that password for the new veracrypt volume, and follow the prompts until it starts encrypting your SSD. It’ll take a while as it encrypts every available bit one-by-one.
Even if veracrypt hits a free space error at the end of the task, the job is done. Maybe not 100%, but 99.99+% of space on the SSD is overwritten with indecipherable gibberish. Maybe advanced forensics could recover some bits, but a) why the fuck would they go to that effort for a filthy commoner like yourself, and b) what are the chances that 0.01% of recoverable data contains anything useful!?! You don’t really need to bother destroying the header encryption key (as apple and android products do when you wipe a device) as you don’t know the password and there isn’t a chance in hell you or anyone else is gonna guess, nor brute force, it.
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If you want to keep/sell the drive…
- Fill up the rest of the usable space
- Encrypt the drive
- Throw away the encryption key/password
- Hard format (writing zeroes to every bit, sorry if that’s the wrong term
Is that the best strategy? Or is anything outside of 2 and 3 redundant?
You can’t fill the drive. The drive decides when to use its buffered free storage blocks. It’s at the hardware level and only the Secure Erase command will clear it.
Right, I read some more of the comments and realized that’s what some of the “unreported space” is used for. Makes sense, thanks!
You fill up the usable space. Or the visible space. No one will disamble the device and read from the raw storage.
Then why do that when you can do a secure erase in seconds?
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That makes sense. Thank you!
a) why the fuck would they go to that effort for a filthy commoner like yourself, and b) what are the chances that 0.01% of recoverable data contains anything useful!?!
Nobody is gonna bother doing advanced forensics on 2nd hand storage, digging into megabytes of reallocated sectors on the off chance they to find something financially exploitable. That’s a level of paranoia no data supports.
My example applies to storage devices which don’t default to encryption (most non-OS external storage). It’s analogous to changing your existing encrypted disks password to a random-ass unrecoverable throwaway.
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- Secure erase using the drive OEMs tool.
- If you were using something like bitlocker then simply dump the key.
- Wood chipper or some other form of absolute physical destruction.
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It’s funnier if I assume you’re talking about point 3.
This article covers several methods. Personally, I’d look for a BIOS based tool first, as that would be free and easiest. After that, the Diskpart Clean All command is probably fine for anything other than Top Secret data which a government based threat actor would be willing to put a lot of resources into recovering. If it’s just your tax documents and porn archive, no one is going to care enough to dig out anything which that command might have left behind.
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If running linux, what command should be run? Shred isn’t viable on a SSD, as it will only tear them down. Shred was designed with HDD in mind.
if the value of the compromised data exceeds the value of the drive, destroy the drive.
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A microwave oven should do the trick
I hear thermite is good at destroying things.
i know this isn’t what is being asked, but disk level encryption is cool
NSA requires the use of a industrial shredder that can grind the components into pieces less than 2mm.
https://ameri-shred.com/portfolio-items/2mm-ssd-solid-state-drive-hammer-mills/
If you can’t do that, you should incinerate the drive at over 700 degrees.
As far as wiping goes, a 3 pass overwrite alternating 0s and 1s is good enough as long as it’s done over the entire drive, not just the partition.
BCWipe is good enough for this
Dalvik boot and nuke.
