Are there any benefits, in terms of performance or security in ‘wiping’ or overwriting an SSD before reinstalling Linux? And if so, what is the best way of doing it?
I’m planning on doing a clean install of Debian 13 on my laptop soon.
I’m currently on Fedora and using encryption and will be using encryption on Debian too. I do not have a separate home partition.
Thanks :)
Security … Depends. If you want to sell the SSD, then yes, wiping the SSD is advised. You don’t need complicated random multiple-write patterns. Just make sure to wipe everything (keywords: wear-leveling, cache), you could use
blkdiscard
for that.Performance-wise nothing noticeable would change. Physically, SSDs are fast enough to modify the charge traps to store the bits as needed to store files regardless of what’s in those traps (that’s quite a rabbit hole).
If you plan using the SSD for your own, you don’t need to wipe it, just repartition as needed and create the file systems in the partitions. What I do, is writing some data to the storage to destroy the partition table (
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/XYZ
whereXYZ
is my target device – and then leave it runninf for a few seconds).Since you’re using encryption, the common tools only see garbage and no data (i.e. file system). So simply don’t decrypt and work with the mapped partition but use the device directly.