I scanned a large collection of family photos and kept copies on two portable SSDs for redundancy. They were convenient for frequent backups, but I've now archived the photos on hard drives and M-Disc media as well. Since SSDs may not be ideal for long-term offline storage, I'm considering selling the portable drives. What's the most reliable way to permanently erase every copy of my data from an SSD so it can't be recovered? Would I be better off keeping the drives as part of a 3-2-1 backup strategy?
4 Answers
Use the SSD’s built-in Secure Erase or Sanitize feature, either through the manufacturer’s utility or your computer’s firmware settings. These commands are designed for flash storage and are much more appropriate than repeatedly overwriting the entire drive. On many modern SSDs, Secure Erase also destroys or replaces the internal encryption key, making the old data inaccessible.
Keeping the SSDs is reasonable if you want extra backup copies and don’t need the sale money. Just don’t treat them as your only long-term archive; retain multiple copies on different media and check or refresh them periodically. For selling, though, a manufacturer-provided Secure Erase or Sanitize operation is the better choice.
Avoid old hard-drive wiping tools that write across the whole disk repeatedly. They add unnecessary wear to an SSD and still aren’t the ideal way to handle flash storage. If the drive’s secure-erase tools aren’t available, physically destroying the NAND chips is the most certain option, though that obviously makes the drive unsellable.
Deleting the partitions and issuing TRIM is generally enough for ordinary consumer privacy, because the SSD will eventually clear the discarded blocks. However, TRIM isn’t the strongest guarantee if you’re specifically worried about forensic recovery, so use Secure Erase or Sanitize before selling it.
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