Solid State Drives (SSDs) are fast and efficient. More new computers than ever come with them, and many of us have upgraded our existing PCs and Macs to them to get better performance or to replace dead or dying spinning hard drives.

With prices dropping on larger SSDs, those of us who have outgrown our current models are ready to upgrade. What’s more, SSDs die and need to be replaced just like everything else. When it comes time to hand down, recycle or get rid of your SSD, what do you do? Read on for details.

Don’t Bother Degaussing, Drilling Holes or “Zeroing out” an SSD
First, let’s focus on some “dont’s.” These are tried and true methods used to make sure that your data is unrecoverable from spinning hard disk drives. But these don’t carry over to the SSD world.

Degaussing – applying a very strong magnet – has been an accepted method for erasing data off of magnetic media like spinning hard drives for decades. But it doesn’t work on SSDs. SSDs don’t store data magnetically, so applying a strong magnetic field won’t do anything.

Spinning hard drives are also susceptible to physical damage, so some folks take a hammer and nail or even a drill to the hard drive and pound holes through the top. That’s an almost surefire way to make sure your data won’t be read by anyone else. But inside an SSD chassis that looks like a 2.5-inch hard disk drive is actually just a series of memory chips. Drilling holes into the case may not do much, or may only damage a few of the chips. So that’s off the table too.

Erasing free space or reformatting a drive by rewriting it zeroes is an effective way to clear data off on a hard drive, but not so much on an SSD. In fact, in a recent update to its Mac Disk Utility, Apple removed the secure erase feature altogether because they say it isn’t necessary. So what’s the best way to make sure your data is unrecoverable?

Lock It Up and Throw Away the (Encryption) Key
Hopefully your SSD isn’t dead yet or hasn’t been pulled because this takes a bit of advanced planning. But as the old expression goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

The easiest way to make sure the data on your SSD is unrecoverable is not to erase at all, but to encrypt it. Without having the passphrase or encryption key to recover from, any data on that drive is useless to anyone that finds it.

Apple’s FileVault is encryption software included with macOS. Microsoft’s built-in encryption software for Windows is called BitLocker. Both systems …