Secure Erase SSD drive

[conamor]

Good day,

I would like to wipe an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD drive. I used to use it in a Windows 7/8 computer.

I am now selling the drive and I have it plugged as a USB in mac OSX.

Is there any procedure I should follow to erase the drive? I would like it to be as secure as possible.

Let me know what I should be doing,

Thanks

 

[poiihy]

Open disk utility, select the drive, go to the Erase tab, and follow instructions. Click the Security Options button to select a secure erase option. You only really need the 'Zero over' option. Any higher will make nearly no difference at all.

 

[LV426]

Open disk utility, select the drive, go to the Erase tab, and follow instructions. Click the Security Options button to select a secure erase option. You only really need the 'Zero over' option. Any higher will make nearly no difference at all.

"Certain types of media may retain data that Disk Utility cannot erase".

This might be the case for your SSD, so watch out. The SSD controller will attempt to minimise the number of write cycles that it performs against a particular physical location in the SSD. It's not at all like a hard disk where you can write and re-write a sector pretty much as often as you like. Consequently, an SSD is more likely to leave data untouched after an erase/write cycle.

You might want to think about enabling file encryption on the SSD. Then it doesn't really matter what's on the SSD. Once the decryption key is gone, the data is useless.

 

[benthewraith]

Open disk utility, select the drive, go to the Erase tab, and follow instructions. Click the Security Options button to select a secure erase option. You only really need the 'Zero over' option. Any higher will make nearly no difference at all.

Do NOT do this. This is the improper way of erasing an SSD and will shorten the drive's lifetime.

 

[conamor]

I have found on OCZ website a format utility for SSD drives.
The option says securely erase.

So I believe that it should be enough... Thanks for all the help

 

[flyinmac]

Fire works pretty good