[MacTUG] Secure Erase of SSDs

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

Peter, I am looping you in on this one as I am trying to remember the details of a Friday morning seminar you gave many moons ago…

I believe that you said that a normal “secure erase” does not work because as there is a portion of the SSD that is always reserved for its own use (for things like file allocation tables) and unlike the partition that would be reserved for such things on a conventional disk, on an SSD this space is always changing. Which means that a secure erase may not get all the bits of the SSD that have had data written to them.

I believe you said the best solution is to erase the disk and then encrypt is and reformat is while encrypted. Is that right?

If so I think the protocol here follows along that line of thinking…
https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to/securely-erase-macs-ssd/



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Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environment
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
https://uwaterloo.ca/environment-computing/about/people
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From: <mactug-bounces at lists.uwaterloo.ca> on behalf of Dani Roloson <daroloso at uwaterloo.ca>
Date: Monday, November 5, 2018 at 2:26 PM
To: MacTUG <mactug at mailman.uwaterloo.ca>
Cc: Chris Roth <cmroth at uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: [MacTUG] Secure Erase of SSDs


Colleague has a question about preparing Macs for surplus and is wondering what others do on campus.

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What is the best way to securely erase the SSD in an Apple computer that is going to surplus?

The Apple web site:  https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208496
How to erase a disk for Mac - Apple Support<https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208496>
support.apple.com
Use Disk Utility to erase (format) a hard disk, flash drive, or other storage device for Mac.



says to use Disk Utility – it does not specify that a particular version has to be used.  Article is from September 2018.

In general, data on SSDs can be rendered unreadable by encrypting the drive and then removing the encryption key, but how to do this in MacOS?

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Christine Roth
MFCF
MC3068 X36463

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