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How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

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Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#61

Post by pktgen »

StavrosK wrote: post #32
rdl wrote: post #18

My policy is: First: 1) use encryption from day one. As long as you can be assured the encryption never failed (somehow repartitioning and writing bare data to the drive), it is a viable option to treat the drive as non-sensitive, depending on what it was used for. Then: 2) use ATA secure erase to wipe it. This command, if you believe it was implemented correctly, should wipe the entire drive, including reserved spac…

Step 1.5: Use something that overwrites everything, for good measure. I'd say this is more important than #1, since encryption is more likely to fail than overwriting (I once discovered that my encrypted volume had actually been set up as unencrypted, and I wasn't encrypting the things I thought I was).

Yep, write random data to the entire drive before doing the secure erase. That way, even if the secure erase implementation is completely broken, at least the remaining data should be limited to the spare area of the drive.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#65

Post by andai »

StavrosK wrote: post #31
3pt14159 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bitcoin wallet is not top-secret material and I don't trust myself not to fuck up overwriting the entire disk. I'd rather just take an angle grinder to it and not worry about it.

If your Bitcoin wallet is on your hard drive, recovery after overwrite is the least of your worries.

Where is yours? Hardcopy?

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#66

Post by andai »

elif wrote: post #57

$1000 to shred an SSD? i bet 20 rounds of 12 gauge for $15 would sufficiently pulverize it. Maybe this wasn't written by an american? What about some kind of acid bath to liquefy the silicon? Or even our old free plasma generator: bonfires? I think there are fun/creative/cheap routes not explored in this article.

What about microwaving? Would that work?

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#67

Post by andai »

rwmj wrote: post #38
sborra wrote: post #29

What about the chemical option - attacking the board with a strong acid. Are there any readily available acids that would do the trick?

I immerse my old HDDs and SSDs in full sugar Coke.

I know you're probably joking, but would this actually work? I know it dissolves teeth.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#68

Post by Gracana »

DanBC wrote: post #60
djaychela wrote: post #9

I'm constantly amazed at the waste that happens when people decide they are going to destroy an old (serviceable) hard drive because they want to protect their old data on it. I don't see a need in 99% of cases, when there are perfectly good ways to permanently delete the data and make it unrecoverable, albeit taking a longer time. No doubt I'll get shot to bits for this with various edge cases where it's important t…

Disc drives are consumable items. They only last 5 years. They're so fragile we treat them as if they're going to fail at any time - we have multiple backups in many places. We shouldn't be encouraging people to use them for as long as possible, we should be encouraging better recycling. I agree about other electronics though - the constant upgrade cycle is very damaging to the environment.

If your uptime doesn't matter and you keep good backups, I don't see why you shouldn't run it 'til it won't, and then recycle it. All my shit's more than 5 years old. Some of it is nearing 20. I guess there's an argument to me made about saving power with newer technology, but I don't want to spend the money to upgrade and I'm not sure which recycling companies recycle properly vs shipping everything out to be stripped down by children with hammers and coal fires.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#69

Post by datguacdoh »

rdl wrote: post #18

My policy is: First: 1) use encryption from day one. As long as you can be assured the encryption never failed (somehow repartitioning and writing bare data to the drive), it is a viable option to treat the drive as non-sensitive, depending on what it was used for. Then: 2) use ATA secure erase to wipe it. This command, if you believe it was implemented correctly, should wipe the entire drive, including reserved spac…

For SSDs, it's easier to ensure that the drive you're buying implements encryption at the controller level because then the secure erase option happens nearly instantaneously. Just look for AES-256 in the drive specs. It happens so quickly because all it does is overwrite the encryption key on the controller as opposed to waiting hours for the standard secure erase procedure to complete. At that point all the data is useless.

Re: How to securely recycle or dispose of your SSD

#70

Post by raverbashing »

3pt14159 wrote: post #24
raverbashing wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree Unless you're dealing with top-secret material, losing the encryption key is the best way Or just dd around 5x - 50x (or more if you're paranoid) its size to the disk - if you want to further reuse it. No, you won't have a meaningful amount of data remaining on the disk and extracting it requires special software/hardware. Unless you're dealing with data that makes the disk price irrelevant, you can follow th…

A bitcoin wallet is not top-secret material and I don't trust myself not to fuck up overwriting the entire disk. I'd rather just take an angle grinder to it and not worry about it.

If your btc wallet is left unencrypted in your hard drive, either spinning or ssd, you have bigger problems than someone rummaging for your used hardware
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