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I have a bunch of SSD's that needs a secure wiping as there is sensitive data on it, but the program I use also have to give me some kind of report.

I am doing this for another person, so it is really important that it is wiped well and I get a report after doing it.

Anyone know a solution to this?

Jens Erat
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Oliver Nybroe
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  • So i have been looking into it and was wondering if Blancco is worth using? – Oliver Nybroe Jul 28 '14 at 10:30
  • If the drivers were not encryted then you can't really do a secure wipe because of how the drives work in the first place. – Ramhound Jul 28 '14 at 10:44
  • SO what you are saying is that blancco is making a false advertisement when they say 100% secure erasure on their new Blanco 5? http://www.blancco.com/us/products/total-data-erasure/blancco-5/ – Oliver Nybroe Jul 28 '14 at 10:57
  • Yes; That is what I am saying. The firmware prevent access to certain memory cells, to balance the writes across all cells, if your report is on one of those cells then you won't be able to securely overwrite the file. If you encrypt a SSD, then this process works in your favor, since all you are writting is random noise. – Ramhound Jul 28 '14 at 11:01
  • ah okay, thanks makes sense. So basically the best way is to just take the good old hammer and destroy them and then buy some new ones? – Oliver Nybroe Jul 28 '14 at 11:19
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    You can use the [SATA secure erase feature](https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase) to tell the driver to completely wipe itself. (All parts!) This might not be available on older rotating drivers, but it should work just fine on an SSD. Either issue the command yourself using hdparms, or boot [DBAN](http://www.dban.org/). – Hennes Jul 28 '14 at 11:34
  • Links to similar questions here on [su]:
    http://superuser.com/questions/557283/whats-the-best-algorithm-to-secure-erase-hdd
    http://superuser.com/questions/669363/why-is-disk-utility-diskutil-taking-so-long-to-zero-out-data     – Hennes Jul 28 '14 at 11:41

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My company started using Blancco for SSD erasure and I was hesitant at first due to the reasons Ramhound expressed. We had one of their techs in on a call to explain exactly how they got around these issues. My understanding is that they use a proprietary software to breakdown the freezelocks, and if the software was unable to, it would say so in the report. If we found that the software reported it couldn't complete erasure operations we would shred that SSD, if it gave us the OK, we would repurpose it. Overall, the software is expensive but it works.

JellyTech
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