Density and complexity has gone up several orders of magnitude. Since that time harddrive technology has come a long way. Even then it was highly dubious if data was recoverable after more than 2 overwrites. The 35 times overwrite 'standard' was created in the 70's based on harddrive technology that was current at the time. This will not damage the SSD, it's just a bunch of writes, but you should not do it on the same SSD every day for an entire year. (It's not like a harddisk where residual magnetic charge can remain on the platter, providing a faint 'ghost' of the original value.) Nobody has yet been able to reliably demonstrate that ability as far as I know.)Ī DoD short (3 passes) wipe with a tool like DBAN will exercise every sector of the SSD sufficiently that also the reserved space will be completely overwritten at least once.įor an SSD that means previous content is destroyed beyond recovery. In theory someone could recover information from that. (Depending on the size of the reserved area and the exact algorithm used by the drive.) You didn't really wipe anything, except the partition table.Ī regular normal format would have over-writen the entire filesystem.Įven then the wear-leveling mechanism will probably leave about 5 to 10% of the data intact in the 'reserved space'. You only did a 'Format Quick' which only re-writes the partition tables. I will continue researching on how to wipe my data completely (I know that formatting just recreates the partition table, and doesn't remove the actual files), but I'm curious whether the 35 zero-write will harm an SSD in any way. My question is, can a 35 zero-write wipe harm an SSD?

No, I'm not going to destroy the actual SSD, since that'll be a waste of money, and the fact that I've already sold it for a fairly handsome price. There's rumors that just a single format will do it, but I've tested this and my drive-recovery software was able to find the files after the SSD was formatted. I wouldn't normally bother with this secure-erase, but the drive contained classified high-security software files of my own creation, and I really do not want anybody else to gain access to the information. I know that the 'toughest' wipe that can be done is a 35 zero-write military-grade 'nuke', which essentially wipes the data on the drive 35 times over.

I recently sold my 128GB Crucial M4 SSD (I have a much larger capacity OCZ SSD, which is faster), and need to wipe the drive.

Dod drive wipe