Which secure erase option on mac

Community Bot 1. I've had a similar experience. I want to securely erase a FV-encrypted SSD, but my attempt failed quickly with an error the option to do so was enabled , but the drive seemed to have been "erased" in some form anyway and I proceeded to reinstall OSX.

I don't know where I am now though. Is this the correct procedure? Have I performed the "official" "secure" erase procedure for a FV-encrypted SSD after all error message and nearly instant completion notwithstanding? The Overflow Blog. Podcast Explaining the semiconductor shortage, and how it might end.

Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked Related Hot Network Questions. Question feed. Ask Different works best with JavaScript enabled. From the above options, Security Option 1 is, of course, the least secure.

Someone will be able to recover your data without much effort. Security Option 4 is the most secure, but it is also takes a long time, especially if you are erasing a hard drive. You may have to comply with specific rules in your company, using the most secure options, but in most cases, any of the three more secure options is probably sufficient.

This works for any hard drive, internal or external. Just be aware that if you want to properly erase the hard drive that is also your startup drive, you will have to start your Mac from an external media first. It can be practical to have a bootable external drive handy for this sort of action, or for troubleshooting.

Writing a pass of all zeros on an SSD may actually wear down the memory cells more and could affect reliability. While this may not be the case anymore with current SSD technologies, Apple took the option out of Disk Utility for a reason.

By using FileVault to encrypt the drive startup drive and Disk Utility to encrypt external drives, all the data on the drive will be garbled, unless someone has the encryption key your password. In fact, using FileVault is the best protection for any drive. You may not even need to securely erase a hard drive, if you use FileVault, though, again, company policy may require this anyway.

If you have FileVault enabled, when it comes time to part with your drive, all you have to do is a basic erase in Disk Utility. While you may not be able to see any files, that drive can still have those files on it, and someone with the know-how and a few apps may be able to recover the files.

Back when drives were much smaller, they did in fact do this. However, as we began to work with drives that were starting to use Gigabytes of storage, it began to take longer and longer to erase these drive.

In the name of speed, the quick erase function was developed. This is also true on other systems like Windows and Linux. When you wipe a drive this way, your Mac or other computer simply tells the drive to just ignore whatever is on there and let it be written over.

Someone with special tools or who knew how to chip paint at a wall may be able to recover parts of it. Another reason is with the rise of solid state drives, which includes things like flash drives, erasing caused wear on the drives. Unlike the older spinning drives, a solid state drive can only be written to so many times.

Every time you save a file, add something, etc. Fortunately most good flash drives and other solid state storage mediums wear out after millions of uses, but each little bit helps.

In a lot of cases, this quick erase is fine. Go ahead and plug your external drive into your Mac. Then open the Disk Utility app by opening the Applications folder, then the Utilities folder, and finding Disk Utility in there.

Once opened, should see the drive connected to your Mac in the left sidebar of the window. Select the flash drive you want to erase. Note you can also do this for a single partition of the external drive by selecting that partition instead. In this case, I want to erase the whole 4 gig drive. A new window should pop up.