On the other hand, according to the 2014 NIST Special Publication 800-88 Rev. Only degaussing or physical destruction is acceptable for the latter. I just want to know if it is truly as unrecoverable as writing multiple passes to the disk like DoD 5502.22-M does.Īs of November 2007, the United States Department of Defense considers overwriting acceptable for clearing magnetic media within the same security area/zone, but not as a sanitization method. So my question is, does this 'secure erase' basically just tell the drive's controller (whether it's a NAND for a SSD or the logic board in a hard drive) to securely erase all the data, and it implements whatever method the manufacturer programmed in for data erasure? Because it's definitely much faster than a 3-pass wipe, if it works.

It takes a couple hours, but it has the same end result. I notice that you can send the secure erase command to a hard drive as well and it works. The only downside to this is that you can't use any sort of USB dock or enclosure, it has to be connected directly with SATA. I'm no storage engineer, but it definitely does erase SSDs to the point that they appear unused.įor this I was using Parted Magic which has the option built in to send the ATA Secure Erase command to a drive. And for anything SSD-based (which is a lot these days) it's a complete waste of time.īut, on the context of SSDs, a friend of mine who also works in IT told me to use the Secure Erase command to wipe SSDs, and told me that it will make the data completely unrecoverable because the SSD controller 'flips the bits' or something like that. It works fine, but takes a while because it's doing multiple passes.

When I've done this myself, I usually just use DBAN Autonuke mode, which is the three-pass DoD 5502.22-M method, plus an extra pass at the end that zeroes it all back out.Ī coworker recently purchased a program that can make 'certificates' of the drive erasure, and its default is also that same method. For context, we have (business) customers who want to dispose of their old PCs, but want the data destroyed first.

Dod wipe ssd