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 :)

  • Hawke@lemmy.world
    10·
    19 hours ago

    It’s sort-of true. Write cycles are limited.

    However most modern-ish SSDs have a secure-erase command which would allow clearing without actually re-writing each sector from the OS level. It’s also much faster.

    There are utilities to do this: hdparm and blkdiscard

    That said, there’s little reason to do this.

    • TXL@sopuli.xyz
      4·
      14 hours ago

      In my experience it’s also very very hard to wear out an SSD. It’s limited, but mostly the limit is very very far away. I treat those warnings as largely fud. Most common failure more seems to be that the controller in the drive dies for some reason and the drive just goes completely dead and never gets detected again. There won’t be warnings from any smart values either.

      Or the drive is just replaced with a bigger faster one, maybe on a different bus/connector or something, and forgotten in a drawer or a box somewhere.

      Naturally it’s still worth trying to enable trim and limit writes if there’s no downside. It can only help in case the drive does get an exceptionally long service life. But I’d say use it while it’s still useful and keep fresh and verified backups.