Ssds in raid 0..format before resale?

413x · 21 Mar 2018 at 10:52

I'm stripping down my desktop which I'm selling. I ran the OS off raid 0 ssds

As far as I'm aware I can just sell these individually without formatting as the data is impossible to retrieve from one drive?

Is that the case?

Dunks · 21 Mar 2018 at 11:04

Files smaller than the stripe size will be stored as the full file on one of the disks. I'd just DBAN to be safe.

413x · 21 Mar 2018 at 12:11

Dunks said:
Files smaller than the stripe size will be stored as the full file on one of the disks. I'd just DBAN to be safe.

Got you.
That's what I was wondering.
Dban it is

SC0TTRS · 21 Mar 2018 at 13:15

DBAN won't work on SSD's.

Armageus · 21 Mar 2018 at 13:49

SC0TTRS said:
DBAN won't work on SSD's.

Pretty sure it will (as it just writes the whole drive with random data etc) - however it's a bad idea from a write endurance point of view.

Best option is generally to get the manufacturers SSD toolkit and do a secure erase which zeros the drive at a hardware level (without needless burning through write cycles e.g. due to write amplification).

If you want to be absolutely sure then run some recovery software afterwards (e.g. trial of https://www.easeus.com/) and see if it can recover anything.

mrbazmondo · 21 Mar 2018 at 19:12

If you trim the entire drive it'll wipe all the data. It will be doing this async though. All the chunks will be put on a list to erase. Not sure how long it takes to finish, but it'll be pretty much impossible to recover any data. You'd have to refirmware it in a hurry with a special build and know the internals of that drive. Just trim it and leave it plugged in for an hour if you're paranoid.

voidshatter · 25 Mar 2018 at 15:42

Armageus said:
Pretty sure it will (as it just writes the whole drive with random data etc) - however it's a bad idea from a write endurance point of view.

Best option is generally to get the manufacturers SSD toolkit and do a secure erase which zeros the drive at a hardware level (without needless burning through write cycles e.g. due to write amplification).

If you want to be absolutely sure then run some recovery software afterwards (e.g. trial of https://www.easeus.com/) and see if it can recover anything.

It will work to some extend, but there may occasionally be outliers. Since you know write amplification, you might also know over-provisioning. Some SSDs may have aggressive over-provisioning algorithm, resulting in some logical sectors not being overwritten by one single disk fill.

Thus the most secure way is to execute a secure erase command on the SSD so that each physical sector can be erased.

KIA · 25 Mar 2018 at 18:17

Secure erase.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/parted_magic.html