Wiping an unencrypted SSD in preparation for encryption
I'm about to install buster or bullseye on a newly acquired laptop
with an SSD (a first for me). I'm intending to clean (zero or
randomise) the entire drive with dd before I start, and am
interested in any pitfalls with that.
I will also encrypt the new /home partition, but for the remaining
partitions I need to decide whether to add mount's discard option,
or use a weekly systemd trim, or leave it entirely up to the garbage
collection in the SSD device itself (which is an nvme THNSN5512GPUK
TOSHIBA, presumably an OEM model supplied for this HP Spectre).
The machine has 16GB of memory, so I wasn't intending to use swap.
(It won't have to hibernate, and if push came to shove, there's
always the possibility of setting up a swapfile or a ramdisk.)
Background:
The July 2017 system was pre-installed with Windows 10.
I have copied the entire disk to external spinning rust, and can
mount partitions from this image. It's difficult to foresee my ever
wanting to reload and run this Windows system.
The drive has unencrypted information on it, either in existing files,
or in deleted/overwritten/whatever ones (though I think that is
irrelevant to the method for erasing them).
I don't work for the CIA, so "basic" erasure methods are sufficient,
ie so-called logical and digital sanitisation, but not analogue
sanitisation/purging. I'm just encrypting stuff like personal bank
records etc, and not looking for anything like plausible deniability.
Cheers,
David.
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