Securely erase an SSHD a.k.a. Solid State Hybrid Drive

Hardware
1

I successfully cloned my older SSHD I got out of my laptop, into which I placed a new SSD to replace the old SSHD. Now I want to securely erase this drive. I know a lot about HDDs but not so much about SSDs which stem from a comparatively new execution of an old technology. The initial not so in-depth search did not reveal much help, as most responders in other fora were saying that it’s either not really possible to erase an SSD anyway (which is not true, according to my limited knowledge) or they were saying that it is unnecessary.
That said, I don’t really need to erase it entirely, but I want to and maybe someone here could help me with that, especially since this is a special case, because I can’t access the SSD part in the drive directly, anyway. Somehow I assumingly have to erase the SSD through erasing the HDD in whatever fashion.

Any ideas?

2

Hi Akito,

The wiping an SSHD, depends on which school of thought, you lean to.

I have no first hand experience of wiping a SSHD, except reformatting via gparted, I do use a 2.5" 2TB Seagate Firecuda in my docking station and have successfully encrypted it.

Due to strong opinions from both camps, plus I had converted to SSD and UEFI mid 2014, thus ignored SSHD, when they came available.

If you are considering selling the SSHD, it would be very prudent to encrypt the drive (at least three times, with Gnome Disk Utility) and use a long random password, and delete via gparted, then repeat. I do this especially when I sell a computer with a SSD that I have used and stored data. Yet to kill a SSD.

This is considered the most reliable method, when dealing with SSD, as the cache has been randomly filled with data, during the ecryption and reformatting cycles.

Wipe SSD
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda iflag=nocache oflag=direct bs=4096 takes @ 8hrs for 500Gb SSD and is a thorough method, but long winded.

Wipe HDD
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

DBAN
Download DBAN burn to CD, this take @ 15hrs for a 7200 rpm plater disk, for HDD only, unless some one, really knows better and able to verify their findings.

Blanco
Paid for service, see DBAN site, very effective, 3 hours to erase twin 1TB HDD set up.

PartedMagic
Paid for service, needs replacing every 12 months, useful boot rescue tools along with wiping SSD and HDD apps, gparted etc.

:sunglasses:

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3

No, I am going to use them for my own stuff, I just wondered how to securely delete an SSHD. I probably write the disk full with random data several times, before selling, if I would sell.

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4

A bit late, but I was doing so research on this today as I used to killdisk when I had windows. I am not sure how effective it is for Linux and if works for ssds. However I did find this. I don’t know if it will work as it is from Kingston https://www.kingston.com/us/community/articledetail/articleid/29539 about doing it.

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