SOLVED Wiping an SSD, what is the best cheapest way to make sure it's clean?

Seriously...the only stuff I would even care about encrypting are SS/credit card/bank info. That's not a lot of data. I don't see why you need to encrypt everything if you have nothing to hide?

Knufire said:

Seriously...the only stuff I would even care about encrypting are SS/credit card/bank info. That's not a lot of data. I don't see why you need to encrypt everything if you have nothing to hide?

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for that small amount of data put it on a usb pin drive and just safeguard that, use it only when you need to and keep it out of your machine when you aren't using it. I guess my life is boring because anyone watching me will be bored to death, I know because the old lady fell asleep on the couch watching me

SPL Tech said:

I dont understand why more people dont use encryption. If you use True Crypt and encrypt the entire drive from the day you bought the thing, then no one can access the drive and you never need to worry about overwriting the data. True Crypt uses 256-bit encryption and with a 20+ digit password consisting of a verity of characters, special charterers and numbers, there is not enough computing power in the world to crack the encryption in any reasonable amount of time and if you encrypt the drive from the beginning, the only data that will ever have resided on the drive will have been encrypted, so there is nothing to find.

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Encryption means never having to say you are sorry. Many companies use whole hard drive encryption on all of their computers to limit liability.

DAKz said:

I gots to wonder how much money is really made on paranoia each year? Between this thread and the silly lifelock ad I just saw there has to be big money into the fears. Honestly I would not worry about it unless you have something really good to hide then use what the old hackers used to call "The Panic Button"

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Perhaps you have been living under a rock. How many instances have laptops been lost or stolen with lots of personal info on them? How many medical records or court records have been lost? A company that shall remain nameless backed up a whole lot of data on tapes to be stored offsite. The courier lost the tapes. The company had to pay for privacy guard for everyone who had records on the tapes. This happens over and over again. In almost every state. To many, many companies and institutions. If the data was encrypted by trucrypt or some other means, then it would be 'woops we lost a few thousand dollars of iT equipment', not 'woops we lost lots of PII (personally identifiable information) and now we have to report it and pay lots of money'.

Just yesterday, a small company called Apple reported being breached. They said things like credit card numbers and passwords were encrypted, but lots of PII was unencrypted. If only they had encrypted everything... I bet they wish they had.

A few months ago another small company called Sony was repeatedly breached and lots of stuff including passwords were captured.

If your SSD is encrypted and lost/stolen, then you need a new copy of the data and a few hundred hard drive. All your private stuff will be protected.

DAKz said:

for that small amount of data put it on a usb pin drive and just safeguard that, use it only when you need to and keep it out of your machine when you aren't using it. I guess my life is boring because anyone watching me will be bored to death, I know because the old lady fell asleep on the couch watching me

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That's pretty much what I do. USB drive, encrypted, in a safe.

I can understand encryption in the enterprise environment, like the examples given above. That's large volumes of sensitive information, with lots of bad PR and monetary loss if it gets out.

But for the home user? For the typical user on these forums, the majority of their data is probably their music collection, family photos, a few games, maybe some Adobe Creative Suite programs, etc. Encrypting all that data just seems like a waste.

Knufire said:

But for the home user? For the typical user on these forums, the majority of their data is probably their music collection, family photos, a few games, maybe some Adobe Creative Suite programs, etc. Encrypting all that data just seems like a waste.

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If you use your computer for consulting, it might be bad if the data programs or other company proprietary data went missing. Is consulting on our personally computers so rare in this forum? I do it from time to time... It can't be all that rare a use-case.

I'm sure people use their pc for work, yes. But the general population of people here are pretty young for the vast majority so I can't imagine there is a lot of consulting going on with overcooked pcs. If you need information on your pc, overclocking it isn't the best idea. So yeah, I would call it rare here that people 'consult' with their overcooked gaming machine, yes.

For the most part, people don't need to encrypt anything outside of personal data... I liken this to your ecc memory stance as well. Most don't remotely need to do either of these things for a stable, secure computing experience.

EarthDog said:

I'm sure people use their pc for work, yes. But the general population of people here are pretty young for the vast majority so I can't imagine there is a lot of consulting going on with overcooked pcs. If you need information on your pc, overclocking it isn't the best idea. So yeah, I would call it rare here that people 'consult' with their overcooked gaming machine, yes.

For the most part, people don't need to encrypt anything outside of personal data... I liken this to your ecc memory stance as well. Most don't remotely need to do either of these things for a stable, secure computing experience.

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I suppose if all you care about is frame rates and low prices, you don't need to encrypt your hard drives; after all it will just slow down the access. Intel certainly charges quite a premium for processors that support ECC memory. And you don't need ECC memory either. On the other hand, I see people building on these forums building big honking servers or disk arrays. I bet they are using ECC memory. I guess there are all kinds of people on these forums. I don't advocate that everyone needs ECC. If I was very price sensitive, I would consider doing without it.

Both have their place, but it is not in this thread. I wholeheartedly agree that they each have their own situation (my laptop's SSD and HDD are fully encrypted, and my servers are only running FBDIMM), but that isn't related to how to wipe a solid state drive, which was the original question. If you'd like to continue discussing it, I encourage you to create a thread. I'm all for open discussion, but I'd prefer we keep it in the proper places.

The original question was answered. The original reason is whats being debated here, to insure protection of information. That was the reason for the wipe question. But I have to agree that if your putting "sensitive" information on an overclocked box then you are asking to lose it. this thread has evolved to the sharing of ideas of how, why, and the safeguarding of sensitive material, wasn't that was the original question?

lopgok said:

Perhaps you have been living under a rock. How many instances have laptops been lost or stolen with lots of personal info on them? How many medical records or court records have been lost? A company that shall remain nameless backed up a whole lot of data on tapes to be stored offsite. The courier lost the tapes. The company had to pay for privacy guard for everyone who had records on the tapes. This happens over and over again. In almost every state. To many, many companies and institutions. If the data was encrypted by trucrypt or some other means, then it would be 'woops we lost a few thousand dollars of iT equipment', not 'woops we lost lots of PII (personally identifiable information) and now we have to report it and pay lots of money'.

Just yesterday, a small company called Apple reported being breached. They said things like credit card numbers and passwords were encrypted, but lots of PII was unencrypted. If only they had encrypted everything... I bet they wish they had.

A few months ago another small company called Sony was repeatedly breached and lots of stuff including passwords were captured.

If your SSD is encrypted and lost/stolen, then you need a new copy of the data and a few hundred hard drive. All your private stuff will be protected.

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"Living under a rock"?? Let me share my "rock" with you, When the V.A. lost the laptop with all the Veteran's personal information on it, I was one of them on there. I repair about 15-20 laptops a day and I am very aware of the amount of personal information that is kept on personal devices. Simple truth is that while we all want to think that we all are being spied on, the fact of the matter is simple, not that many of us lead such exciting lives that warrants being spied on. And as has been the rule for at least 13 years, if you don't want it on the internet, then don't put it on the computer. If you have something that's so sensitive in its nature that their is a risk from either competitors, or little lurky people in shadows stealing it then you and your IT people need to come up with a way to protect it.
I have been on the "internet" long before Al Gore invented it, back when it was a military only connection.And there have been many weaknesses exposed over the years, but still the billions of pieces of data that are communicated every day is still the safest fastest way to move information. If "You" don't take safe precautions to protect your device and your information then if there is someone around that wants it then they will get it. This kind of thinking that everyone is being spied upon is fun for the paranoid, but the simple fact of it is, that its really not a possible task. Anyone that has been at this for a while knows all to well the tricks of stopping any would be attacker or spy. And for consulting and work secrets on devices, while Mr. Jones is worried about keeping his secrets from Mr Smith, Mr Smith is worried about keeping his secrets from Mr Jones, seems productive to me.
As far as the "little" companies you refer to, we all know who did it, and we know why. But if the executives of these companies are really on these boards asking how to make their little secrets safe then remember that when your paying $655 for that iphone 5, that they are getting their IT security advice from an overclockers forum. Again I have to say that personally my life is not that exciting, even after having the V.A. Lose my info, that I fear anyone sitting there spying on me, wish they would have helped a little more when I was setting up the BIOS to overclock this build though.