Lately, I attempt to "clean" an internal disk and, upon choosing Erase, the Security Option choice does not appear?? Does it perhaps have to do with whether it is an SSD or an older conventional hard drive?
MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2012), OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), , Apple since 1979!
Yes. The Disk Utility won't give those options for an SSD.
If you need additional security for data on them, encrypt the files.
(166504)
Thanks, Niel!
SSD’s do not work the same way as rotating hard disks.
1st) An SSD has a finite number of writes per sector before it fails. So writing a secure pattern across the entire SSD will shorten the life of the SSD.
2nd) When you write to a sector, you do not actually overwrite the previous data. The SSD allocates a pre-cleared sector from the pool of spares, writes your data to the newly allocated sector, assigns that sector the logical disk address you used with your write, and puts the previous sector that had that address into the garage collection queue. Eventually that sector will be pre-cleared and moved to the spares. UNLESS, the sector has been written too many times and is starting to fail. In that case it gets removed from use and whatever partial data is in the sector will remain and be accessible with the right recovery tools.
Proper security for an SSD is to encrypt it from day 1, so reformatting the SSD destroys the decryption key and the data, whether in good sectors or bad sectors is just a bunch of random bits.
In Disk Utility, why does Erase not always display Security Option?
