I'm about to trade in a 2010 MacBook Pro with an SSD. However, I'm unable to do a Secure Erase from the recovery disk (as I used to do with mechanical hard drives before selling or giving away a computer) since the "Security Options" button is grayed out.
Based on an article in Apple's knowledge base, the button is intentionally disabled for SSD's because:
Note: 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.
This sounds good to me, and this view was confirmed both at the Genius Bar and by calling Apple.
The problem is that almost every article I can find on this subject contradicts Apple's optimistic view about erasing an SSD. Because SSD's dynamically remap blocks on write and because they have large chunks of free space inaccessible to the OS, it's impossible to overwrite the entire drive.
The single explanation that could reconcile these two perspectives is that MacBook SSD's are "self-encrypting", i.e. they generate a random key and store it in the disk's metadata and encrypt all data stored to the drive with that key (additional explanation here). When I use Disk Utility's Erase button on an SSD, the Mac clears out that key, so even though the data hasn't been overwritten, it's all inaccessible ciphertext now that the key is gone, and is as good as zeroed-out.
The problem is that all I can find to back this view up is a post by a knowledgeable member of the Apple Support Forums. Does anyone know if this is really true? Could you point me to something verifying that Apple's SSD's do this?
Best Answer
Not so much that it's not necessary...
I'm a couple years late to the party, but it might be worth pointing out that Apple (who has now entirely remove "Secure Erase" options from the Disk Utility app) hasn't really removed the option because it "isn't necessary" — according to its El Capitan security release notes, they did it because they can't guarantee a secure erase:
Glenn Fleishman, gives a good overview of this in "How to replace El Capitan's missing Secure Empty Trash." The fact that, currently, the only DoD/NSA approved SSD sanitation procedure is smelting or shredding the drive into a fine powder somewhat echoes the challenge in being able to wipe a drive, for sure.
It is pretty difficult to recover data from an SSD...
As Trane Francks explained, recovering data from an SSD is, by default, pretty difficult. The data isn't necessarily encrypted, but it is distributed data over many locations in order to perform as few writes as possible to a single location (both for performance and for drive longevity). So once data is deleted, find the place a file used to reside in is like putting together a multi-million piece jigsaw puzzle (all before any garbage collecting the drive may decide to do). It is possible to recover files from an SSD, but this usually requires a lot of extra effort.
To make it hard for recovery tools...
Encrypting a SSD with any kind of suitably secure key, and then erasing that key, makes it virtually impossible to recover any data. This can be done, on a Mac, by enabling FileVault, booting into recovery mode, unlocking and then deleting the drive with Disk Utility.
If you're just looking to make sure stuff is securely erased without nuking existing data, you could try using the
diskutilterminal command — the command line version of DiskUtility, wherein secure erase options have not been removed:This should attempt to write and delete a couple tempfiles which will fill up the entire hard drive. In doing so, every available space should be filled and then cleared.
Good information on all these options can be found in "How to Securely Erase a Mac SSD".
Also, you can always try to run some data recovery tools to see if there is data that is still immediately available.