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 :)

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    3·
    14 hours ago

    You only need to overwrite the drive with random data once. Then, as long as every OS install uses FDE, there’s no need to repeat the process.

    The reasons why you do the full disk wipe are:

    1. To hide the size of the encrypted data by making encrypted data indistinguishable from empty space
    2. To erase unencrypted data previously stored on the drive

    Both of which only need to be dealt with once, so long as you don’t write unencrypted data to the drive after doing the wipe.