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I have an old laptop. Using rsync, I back up everything I have that is important to me from my current laptop to my old laptop. I use the old laptop like a usb stick.
This year I will leave China and go back to England. I won't take the old laptop with me, it's too old.
I want to completely erase the ssd, write zeroes over everything. I want to wipe out everything.
How can I do that?
Not that I have any great secrets, but as a matter of principle.
SSD is not a hard-drive. Do not use any of the old solutions like dd. Maybe change the thread title.
Any sort of search should elicit plenty of appropriate answers specific to SSD secure erase.
Any sort of search should elicit plenty of appropriate answers specific to SSD secure erase.
On-topic answers, yes, but good answers, not so much.
I'd look at the steps recommended in the Arch wiki page for Solid state drive/Memory cell clearing. The Arch Wiki is more authoritative and better reviewed than most random (and probably wrong) web pages or articles on the subject of clearing SSDs.
In the future, if you can, "just" encrypt the drive or partition using LUKS and then the only step actually needed is to delete the key. Though that can be supplemented with additional measures to be sure.
An SSD is glorified Static ram. You can set each bit to 1 or to zero. I know there was residual magnetism held in spinning rust which I am told could be recovered or guessed, but devices don't have memory of past electrically charged state, or do they?
So I was right - SSDs don't need fancy demagnetising, sledgehammers or anything. What's gone is gone.
Except a simple delete may leave information available for recovery. You DO need to overwrite every single byte, but only ONCE. (And since writes age your SSD, that preserves more SSD life.)
Check the HDPARM man page, it has two options for secure-erase an SSD drive. Verify that your device is compatible, as this CAN be risky and not all devices comply.
The SURE safe way to secure blank your device is to use the utility provided by the manufacturer.
A question: if I erase the ssd in situ, won't the programme doing the erasing erase itself and then crash?
Yes, but generally you'd run it in RAM instead via a live session or live distro. Most distros' installers have a live mode. Any of the Linux Mint installers would suit your task, or you could get a specialized live distro like Finnix and use that.
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