I took apart my PC before uninstalling Windows because I'm selling some of the parts. I'd like to put the M.2 SSD in an external enclosure and reuse it for extra storage. Will hardware encryption make the drive unusable or lock me out, and is simply formatting it enough to remove my old data?
2 Answers
A normal format usually isn’t the safest way to erase an SSD because some data may remain recoverable. Use the SSD manufacturer’s secure-erase tool or another proper NVMe secure-erase utility instead. That process resets the drive and removes the encryption keys, making the previous contents inaccessible. Also, Windows doesn’t necessarily encrypt every drive by default, so don’t assume BitLocker was enabled just because the drive was used with Windows.
Encryption won’t make the SSD unusable. Even if the drive was protected, you can still erase or reformat it from another computer; encryption only prevents someone from reading the existing data without the key.
Got it—so encryption would make the old files unreadable, not permanently lock the drive. Thanks for clarifying.
I’m not sure whether BitLocker was enabled—I may have disabled it while creating a Windows installer. I mainly want to reuse the SSD as extra external storage, so I’ll use a secure-erase option before formatting it.