If youâre planning to sell a Mac that boots from an SSD, or you have an old Flash drive or SSD you want securely erase, this article has the details.
Itâs been awhile since I sold an old Mac. Back when I did that last, the Mac had a hard disk. Securely erasing a hard disk isnât hard to do, and itâs been discussed in many places.
Prepping Your Mac For Sale
Iâve decided to upgrade my Macbook Pro with a brand new SSD drive, along with a fresh install and upgrade of Mac OS X 10.8.4. My laptop has been a very faithful workhorse these past few years, but its time for a spring clean and a new lease of life with some affordable upgrades.
These days, because SSDs have been an option for Macs for almost a decade, itâs very likely that you have, or will soon have, a Mac for sale that boots from an SSD. Youâll want to securely erase that SSD, but itâs a bit tricker than a plain hard disk.
The first Nikon d500 usb download to mac. thing to do is read Apple support article. âWhat to do before you sell or give away your Mac.â Item #6 in that document launches the discussion and links to a pretty good article: âHow to reinstall macOS.â That article, by the way, has a nifty table that summarizes which versions of macOS you can install from the recovery partition.
Recovery options (CMD-R). Image credit: Apple.
However, that Apple article skips over the nuance of completely erasing an SSD. Free pptp client for mac sierra. Youâll also want to read âOS X: About Disk Utilityâs erase free space feature.â A note at the end starts to get to the heart of the matter.
With an SSD drive, Secure Erase and Erasing Free Space are not available in Disk Utility. These options are not needed for an SSD drive because a standard erase makes it difficult to recover data from an SSD. For more security, consider turning on FileVault encryption when you start using your SSD drive.
That last throw-away comment, âfor more security,â suggests that thereâs a little more to cover, so thatâs the next topic.
The SSD Erasure Issue
The very best description of the difficulty conventional tools have in completely erasing an SSD comes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.) The article is: âHow to: Delete Your Data Securely on Mac OS X.â Skip to the very last major section labeled: âSecure Deletion on Solid-state Disks (SSDs), USB Flash Drives, and SD Cards.â Itâs a long paragraph, but the language is simple as it describes how SSD âwear levelingâ undermines the best efforts of erasure tools to completely overwrite SSD data.
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Rndis driver download for windows xp. As a result of how SSDs write data, the best practice today involves going one step beyond the simple process of using Appleâs Disk Utility âstandard eraseâ for an SSD. And thatâs called a âcryptographic erase.â
Selling your SSD Mac? Cryptographic erasure is a great option. Image credit: Apple.
Cryptographic Erase
Basically, a cryptographic erase means encrypting the drive, then throwing a way the encryption key. This renders the information stored on the drive unreadable. (This what happens when you do a master reset on your iOS device.) Then the SSD is erased and formatted as usual.
If someone were to examine the unused space on the newly erased drive with a digital forensic tool, all that would be seen is encrypted nonsense.
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For an Macâs boot drive, Peter Cohen explains the process nicely. https://potentcampaign.weebly.com/amd-radeon-hd-6800-driver-windows-10.html. âHow to Securely Erase a Mac SSD.â In brief: https://viewssite103.weebly.com/b-h-photo-izotope-rx.html.
And now, phew!, youâre ready to sell your Mac.
Erasing an External SSD
You may want to securely erase an external Flash drive before selling or discarding. The process is slightly different. See Appleâs support document, âEncrypt and protect a disk with a password.â
The drive is now empty, newly formatted and all the previous data is leftover, encrypted garbage.
Final ThoughtsSsd Chemical Cleaning Machine
This is a summary of what Iâve learned. Iâve found that itâs always helpful to read more for a broder perspective and sanity check. This article from Intego has some good background and additional information. âHow to Securely Erase Data from Your Mac and External Drives.â
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