In this Rocket Yard article, we’re going to further explore how to securely wipe an SSD.Īs we said above, the process of securely wiping a hard drive is fairly well understood. We originally looked at the changes High Sierra brought to performing a secure wipe. It may be a good idea to review how Disk Utility can be used to erase and protect information in the article: How to Securely Wipe the Data Stored on a Drive in macOS High Sierra. Which brings us to the question: Can you securely erase an SSD without damaging the drive, and make sure that all of the information is no longer recoverable? (Disk Utility’s Security Options for erasing a drive may not be present when used on an SSD.) To make matters worse, at least from a security standpoint, even after overwriting data on an SSD, it’s possible that some of the original information is still present on the drive. SSDs, on the other hand, can be affected poorly by the same techniques used on hard drives: overwriting data locations multiple times with random data or specific data patterns. So once you delete data let your machine idle for a period of time for the TRIM to take effect and run.The process of securely wiping a drive, that is, removing every bit of the data it contains and scrambling its content enough to protect the information stored on the drive from prying eyes, is fairly well understood for old-fashioned spinning hard drives.

The SSD drive controller will reset the drive cells to ones when it determines that drive activity is at a level that will permit doing so without impacting performance to heavily. When you delete data from an SSD and you are using Windows 7 and up Windows itself will issue a TRIM command to the SSD drive controller. Performing an erase in this manner will limit the amount of writes to the SSD memory cells to the least possible in erasing data and TRIM will reclaim the erased mamory cells which will restore the drives performance to optimum levels.

Issuing the TRIM command resets the cells to ones which marks the cells as free for writes again. When you delete data on an SSD the memory cells are set to zeros. You can securely erase an SSD by simply deleting the data on SSD and then run a TRIM command on the drive. I think Acronis Drive Cleaner is fine to use on a mechanical HDD.

Wipe ssd