Using Disk Utility to Erase an SSD?

Cassady

Cassady

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Hello all,

I upgraded my Crucial M500 240gb, to a 480gb. Installed and cloned this evening, and all appears to be good.

Found a buyer for the 240gb, want to send it off tomorrow. I'm wondering how best to erase it?

Crucial's website says this over here:

- Ensure the SSD is connected and is not the boot drive
- In Finder, go to Utilities and open the Disk Utility
- Highlight the SSD, and go to the Partition tab
- Under Partition Layout, select 1 Partition
- Click on Options... and make sure that GUID Partition Table is selected.
- Click on Apply to create a single large partition on the SSD.
- After the partition is created, click on it so it becomes highlighted. Click the minus sign (-) to remove the partition.

Guess they should know -- but figured I would check things here too... Is it that simple?
 
Cassady said:
Thanks for that. Now I won't sleep....

So how do you scrub an SSD without writing over everything a gazillion times, and ultimately shortening the life expectancy of the drive?
Click to expand...

Delete everything, then
CCleaner "Erase Free Space"

Surely if you fill every block of the SSD with data at the same time, no data will be left unerased.

I don't know about the memory used for over provisioning though, that will still hold recoverable data though. Crucial's drives are 240GB i.e. 256GB, with the balance being used for over provisioning. However, usual thieves won't be able to access that data, probably, so unless it's high level law enforcement or the NSA you should be OK.

I guess doing 7 or 35 passes should clear out the redundant memory too.
 
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