How to Properly Dispose of Solid State Drives
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Do you have an old solid-state drive just sitting around taking up space? Maybe you bought a low-capacity (now relatively slow) SSD in the early days and later upgraded to a larger, faster model. If you can’t think of a way to repurpose your old SSD and just want to get rid of it, cloud backup provider Backblaze has some tips to make sure your data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands.
Unlike hard drives, Backblaze says you shouldn’t bother drilling a decommissioned SSD or piercing it with a hammer and nails. While this is a great way to kill an HDD, drilling holes may only damage the few NAND flash chips in the SSD. We would counter that a good tap with a hammer or strategically drilled holes (through each chip) still works, but the point is.
Backblaze also recommends against zeroing SSDs.
“Erase free space or reformat the drive by overwriting [with] Zeroes are an effective way to clear data on hard drives, but not on SSDs. In fact, in a recent update to their Mac Disk Utility, Apple removed Secure Erase entirely because they said it wasn’t necessary,” Backblaze said.
Instead, Backblaze points to encryption as a means of ensuring your data cannot be read by others. Any old data will be well hidden by encrypting and reformatting the old SSD.
“If you want to rest easier, re-encrypt the drive after formatting, then reformat again,” Backblaze said.
You can check your SSD manufacturer’s website for tools to help with this, as some of these tools provide utilities that can do this.
Aside from encryption (or beyond), shredding an SSD is the best way to permanently bury old data. There are actually devices that do this, although they are quite expensive. Check it out (and enjoy the cheesy background music):
You may not be able to use a dedicated SSD shredder. In this case, we go back to our original advice – mash and/or drill the chips through each one.
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