#Wipe free space ssd how to
#Wipe free space ssd portable
#Wipe free space ssd mac

If you’re concerned about government-level extraction, drilling holes in a hard drive might not be sufficient.

#Wipe free space ssd mac

I recently did this for some elderly friends with a few old drives and a dead Mac mini (see “ Helping Senior Citizens Reveals Past Apple Lapses and Recent Improvements,” 24 June 2022). With a hard drive, a hammer would have a similar effect, though you would want to make sure you damaged the actual platters, which is best done by drilling several holes in them. Of course, you must physically destroy the chips inside the SSD, so make sure they’ve been thoroughly smashed. Samsung probably doesn’t cover SSDs that come back in numerous small bits. That’s quick, effective, and satisfying, but it does present a problem when trying to return the drive under warranty. The simplest way of ensuring that no one could ever read the data on an SSD is to don some eye protection and hit it repeatedly with a hammer. Do you want to prevent someone from recovering the files with off-the-shelf software? Are you concerned that a company like DriveSavers could extract the chips or attach new controllers? Do you worry about a government-level agency reconstructing the data? It’s also worth considering what you think “securely” should mean.

Others may be perfect if you want to erase an SSD or hard drive securely but have different goals for the drive afterward. There are multiple answers to this question, but not all may be appropriate for a drive that’s being returned under warranty. Lucas043’s question: What’s the most secure way of erasing the drive? The SSD has intermittent access problems and is still under warranty, so it could be returned with no problem, but it contains sensitive client data.

#Wipe free space ssd portable

Lucas043 has a Samsung Portable T7 SSD being used for backup. Over on TidBITS Talk, user Lucas043 posed a question that prompted a fascinating discussion.

#Wipe free space ssd how to

How to Securely Erase a Mac’s SSD or Hard Drive

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And yes, it roughly matches the free space on my disk. Assuming APFS uses a 4 KiB block size, it means the SSD has discarded 107 GiB of free space. You should see logs lines that mentions 'TRIM', scan took 7.102084 s, trims took 6.415750 sĢ8059445 blocks trimmed in 247937 extents (25 us/trim, 38645 trims/s)

The lines are too long to read, I slightly edited it to make it shorter. It lists all messages from the kernel ( -predicate 'processID = 0') since the beginning of this month ( -start $(date '+%Y-%m-01') and search for messages that contain 'spaceman' ( grep spaceman). If you want to personally verify the operation of boot time TRIM, you can search for spaceman-related messages in your boot log.Įxecute the following command as root. There is no command and no need to manually trim the unused blocks. Therefore, as long as TRIM is enabled on the system (via trimforce for 3rd-party SSDs, see karolus's answer), you don't have to worry about it. On APFS, macOS automatically performs a TRIM operation on the free disk space on boot via the AFPS Space Manager (spaceman).