Erase Data Prior To Selling Drives

Soldato
Joined
6 Jan 2013
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Rollergirl
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?
 
Associate
Joined
5 Jan 2004
Posts
1,649
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.
 
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