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potatoqualitee / eol-dr

A crowd-sourced guide to help techs help their non-tech spouses / partners / parents / kids when we are at the end-of-life
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Mention SSDs #27

Open jawaad-ahmad opened 2 months ago

jawaad-ahmad commented 2 months ago

I see a couple places mentioning destroying or formatting hard drives. These days it would probably be good to include mentioning SSDs as well, maybe using other common terms e.g. "M.2" or "NVMe". Probably a Tech Tip to simply never get rid of them or else to get them destroyed if the successor can't figure out what to do with each one.

I still haven't figured out how to properly and thoroughly wipe these if it's even possible. Maybe someone else can provide better guidance.

joemcmahon commented 2 months ago

Because they’re not magnetic, the “overwrite with zero” formatting that most platforms can do is sufficient. Spinny drives do retain faint images of old data after overwrite; SSDs do not. It’s possible that a state-level actor might be able to do something with an overwritten SSD but standard data recovery won’t be able to.

On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 12:13 AM Jawaad Ahmad @.***> wrote:

I see a couple places mentioning destroying or formatting hard drives. These days it would probably be good to include mentioning SSDs as well, maybe using other common terms e.g. "M.2" or "NVMe". Probably a Tech Tip to simply never get rid of them or else to get them destroyed if the successor can't figure out what to do with each one.

I still haven't figured out how to properly and thoroughly wipe these if it's even possible. Maybe someone else can provide better guidance.

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virtadpt commented 2 months ago

Why not just destroy the unit? A hammer will do the trick (that's what I use), or in a pinch a pair of pliers to crush the ICs.

joemcmahon commented 2 months ago

Sure, destroying it is always possible, but if it’s (say) an Apple laptop, it’s necessary to destroy the whole computer to destroy the disk, which is unnecessarily wasteful.

On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 2:39 PM The Doctor @.***> wrote:

Why not just destroy the unit? A hammer will do the trick (that's what I use), or in a pinch a pair of pliers to crush the ICs.

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RalphHightower commented 2 months ago

I found an article about zeroing SSDs, and a product to securely wipe drives.