Are there any benefits, in terms of performance or security in ‘wiping’ or overwriting an SSD before reinstalling Linux? And if so, what is the best way of doing it?

I’m planning on doing a clean install of Debian 13 on my laptop soon.

I’m currently on Fedora and using encryption and will be using encryption on Debian too. I do not have a separate home partition.

Thanks :)

  • infjarchninja@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 day ago

    I have been using disktest to overwrite my SSD’s.

    I overwrite the SSD’s before encryption. works just as well on HDD’s too.

    A 2TB HDD takes about 3.5 hours to overwrite with the encrypted seed

    A 250GB SSD takes about 17 minutes to overwrite with the encrypted seed

    https://crates.io/crates/disktest

    https://github.com/mbuesch/disktest

    install with cargo

    cargo uninstall disktest

    much faster than your usual suspects like dd.

    it runs as root: so add this $PATH to the root .bashrc export PATH=/root/.cargo/bin:$PATH

    recent test run on 250Gb ssd with just write with no verify:

    disktest --write -j0 /dev/nvme0n1

    The generated --seed is: omNw4JreY1ZVAfwD4dgooF061R10Ra0vnmYv5SrU Use this seed for subsequent --verify.

    Writing /dev/nvme0n1 (512 bytes sectors), starting at position 0 bytes… [15:09 / 00h:00m:10s] Wrote 7.62 GiB (8.18 GB) @ 779.3 MiB/s …

    [15:26 / 00h:17m:16s] Done. Wrote 238.47 GiB (256.06 GB, 256059113472 bytes) @ 235.5 MiB/s. Successfully dropped file caches. Generated --seed omNw4JreY1ZVAfwD4dgooF061R10Ra0vnmYv5SrU

    Success!

    to check my SSD’s I use:

    prometheus-smartctl-exporter

    sudo smartctl -i -a /dev/nvme0n1