Chosen Solution
I work for a university surplus store, where data security is our number one priority, selling the products we fix is our second. With that being said, everything that we sell need to have the HDD either sanitized or destroyed, and our SSD’s are wiped with Parted Magic ATA Secure erase. As you may know, wiping SSD’s in a laptop can be tricky, as booting from a usb, the SSD does not wake, which means the ATA erase cannot be performed. There is nothing that I can do, other than remove the SSD and put it in a desktop, wipe it, and then reinstall it into the laptop (if the SSD is a 2.5 inch SATA). As you know the airs use mSATA. How can I securely erase these things? I get lucky and sometimes the computer wakes up after I force sleep/wake the machine to try and “wake” the SSD, and sometimes, no matter what I try I cannot get it to wake up to finish to erase the SSD. I’m stuck at the later for this particular machine, and have had no luck at all in wiping this machine. Meaning that I cannot sell it. Any other SECURE suggestions? Thanks.
You do realize Apple offers a secure erase within its Disk Utility. Here’s more: BacBlaze - How to Securely Erase a Mac SSD Basically using any program which is writing patterns over-wears the SSD drive very quickly! You don’t need to do it! HDD’s are very different type of drive, they need the secure erase!
Use the UNIX/Linux Command “shred”. This securely overwrites data 3 times so it cannot be recovered. https://www.computerhope.com/unix/shred…. https://superuser.com/questions/617515/u…
