Retired Engineer, do you have any references? What I have read says otherwise.
Drive Wear & Tear
What is your estimation of wear and tear on the flash by writing to 0's. What percentage of the drives total usage has been "wasted"? I thought even consumer drives where capable of 1000 - 10000 rewrites per cell, whereas enterprise SSDs are capable of over 100,000: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9112065/Solid_state_disk_lackluster_for_l aptops_PCs?taxonomyId=19&pageNumber=1&taxonomyName=Storage.
"For one thing, it matters whether the SSD drive uses SLC or MLC memory. SLC generally endures up to 100,000 write cycles or writes per cell, while MLC can endure anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 writes before it begins to fail, according to Fujitsu's Hagberg. For its part, Western Digital's laptop hard-disk drive boasts up to 600,000 write cycles."
That's an old artcile too. Slightly newer, in late 2008 Micron/Sun achieved SLC NAND chips capable of over 1,000,000 write cycles: http://investors.micron.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=440650 . I imagine things have gotten slightly better in the last 4 years.
Data Wiping
This paper (http://static.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf) states, "In most cases, overwriting the entire disk twice was sufficient to sanitize the disk, regardless of the previous state of the drive."
Going on however, "Overall, the results for overwriting are poor: while overwriting appears to be effective in some cases across a wide range of drives, it is clearly not universally reliable. It seems unlikely that an individual or organization expending the effort to sanitize a device would be satisfied with this level of performance."
The best method I have found for wiping an SSD on a Mac is the (SAFE) Scramble and Finally Erase process as described in this UC San Diego research paper: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/TR-cs2011-0963-Safe.pdf.
According to their paper, the effectiveness of the procedure is equiavlent to degaussing a magentic drive. Another tidbit, the SAFE technique is replicated by Sandforce controller when someone reformats the drive (as mentioned by Linc Davis above, however, I believe this is specific only to Sandforce controllers).
References:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/erasing_data_fr.html
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9211519/Can_data_stored_on_an_SSD_be_secu red_
http://arstechnica.com/security/2011/03/ask-ars-how-can-i-safely-erase-the-data- from-my-ssd-drive/
http://static.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/TR-cs2011-0963-Safe.pdf