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Watsom27 Author

Level 1

8 points

Erasing an old APFS SSD securely

Hi,

I have just upgraded the SSD inside my 2015 macbook pro and have the old one in an enclosure, i never used filevault on it so it is not encrypted. I have been reading about securely erasing the data as i plan to carry it with me and dont want my personal documents etc open to the world if i lose it but have seen that simply running disk utility's secure erase might damage the drive. I also read that another way is to encrypt the drive then lose the encryption key, however, macos wont let me do this as it is formatted in APFS.

So my question is what are my options? Do i just bite the bullet and leave it erasing (through disk utility) for hours or is there a way of encrypting the drive that will also work?

Thanks in advance

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15

Posted on Jan 20, 2020 7:29 AM

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

60,704 points

Posted on Jan 20, 2020 10:33 PM

If you cannot enable Filevault on the drive when it is connected externally, then reinstall the original SSD and enable Filevault and let it finish encrypting. Then reinstall the new SSD and boot it. You can now erase the Filevautled original Apple SSD as an external drive normally and destroy the Filevault key as Apple suggests.

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Erasing an old APFS SSD securely

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