Erase Data Prior To Selling Drives

Dirk Diggler · 20 Nov 2018 at 13:57

What's the best method to erase data from HDD & SSD prior to selling the drives on? I'm thinking Gparted via Ubuntu? Is that enough?

Also, are there Linux facilities available to do a health check on the drives?

matthab · 21 Nov 2018 at 18:52

https://eraser.heidi.ie/ - been using this for ages, goes up to DoD standards.

Dirk Diggler · 21 Nov 2018 at 18:56

Hey, thanks for the reply. I ended up using shred command in Linux.

rIcK · 1 Dec 2018 at 05:07

Yikes, don't do this to your SSDs you will destroy them. The data will still be floating around due to how these drives get overprovisioned and the controller randomly moves around data.

What you need to do is the following. Many modern motherboards have the option of 'secure erasing' ssds. In reality what this does is change the encryption key on the controller takes literally seconds and the data is completely unrecoverable. It is basically doing the following:

https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

As for a normal disk, shred works well enough. If you don't think the data is that important then a small handful of zero wipes should do the trick.

Dirk Diggler · 1 Dec 2018 at 05:47

rIcK said:
Yikes, don't do this to your SSDs

I didn't do the shred with the SSD, only the HDD.