Your old solid state drive (SSD) has a lot of files on it that you probably don’t want ending up in a stranger’s hands, so you keep it in a place safe from prying eyes and greedy hands. As long as it lives in your home or office, you make sure nobody, not least a stranger, has the opportunity to snoop inside it.

Yet SSD technology is advancing all the time, and prices are falling consistently, so it’s common to upgrade to a newer one every few years. Only a madman would throw away an old drive with their files still on it, you correctly surmise. And so before you ditch your old SSD you connect it to your computer one last time and delete all your files. Mission accomplished, right? Not hardly. Despite being deleted, the ghosts of your old files are still deep within the drive, waiting to be discovered and recovered. Don’t panic yet. There’s a way to delete them for certain.

Even Erased Data Can Pose a Risk

Backing up your computer’s files on an external drive is one of the smartest moves you can make when it comes to protecting your precious documents and photographs from accidental deletion, file corruption, or the physical destruction or loss of your computer. If all your data lives only inside of your computer, then it disappears when your computer does.

These backup drives can turn into a liability when it comes time to replace and dispose of them if you don’t thoroughly wipe their data. Most computers these days, especially laptops, come with SSDs built into them, too. Those of you who know computers rather well may think you’ll go one step further than file deletion and reformat the drive, a sort of factory reset that puts it into a blank, like-new state.

Even that doesn’t prevent somebody with specialized recovery software from gathering the remnants of data that remain on your drive, even after file deletion and reformatting. Those crumbs of data are hard to truly erase, and yet they’re enough for entire files to be brought back from the dead.

Who would want the discarded files of boring, old me? you may think. You’d be surprised. Criminals often target regular folks because they’re less protected than major corporations or wealthy individuals, and even regular folks have bank accounts, retirement accounts, and investment accounts ripe for plundering. Regardless of how opposite you are from James Bond or Warren Buffett, make it so that nobody can recover even the smallest crumb of your data from your drives before you junk or resell them.

How to Find and Use the Right Software

What you need is a program that reaches into each and every memory cell to erase its electrical charge (AKA, data), which conclusively ensures that it’s no longer storing any data remnants. It’s thorough and comprehensive. There can be trillions of such cells in a common, consumer-grade SSD. That’s partly why standard file deletion doesn’t completely erase all these tiny fragments of data hiding in memory cells; it’s designed to be quick and convenient, not to reach into trillions of cells to sweep away every last crumb.

We already have a guide on how to permanently destroy your hard drive (HDD). You don’t need to do that if you have a more modern SSD because SSDs lack HDDs’ spinning ceramic platters. You just need to run the secure erase software.

Most brands that produce SSDs offer such software for free, but you have to download it from the official website. Whenever possible, I prefer to use the drive manufacturer’s official software. For the SSDs I own and have tested, that means I’ve used Samsung’s Magician Software, Seagate’s Sea Tools, Western Digital’s WD Drive Utilities, and Crucial’s Storage Executive.

1. Google your drive’s brand name, plus “secure erase,” to see if there’s a first-party tool available. Some may not offer a secure erase tool, and so you’ll have to download one from a reputable third-party. Such third-party secure erase tools include Parted Magic ($49) and Blancco (free trial).
2. This is your last chance to transfer or back up the data on your soon-to-be-deleted external drive. If it’s not already on another drive, computer, or cloud storage account and you need it, transfer or copy it over to another drive (one you’re not going to erase or throw away) now.
3. When you’ve done that and you’re sure you’re completely finished with your drive, connect the soon-to-be-expired external drive to your computer with a USB-A or USB-C cable.
4. Navigate to your external drive in Mac’s Finder or Windows’ File Explorer, right click on it, and run the secure erase software that pops up as an option. It may say “sanitize,” “secure erase,” or something like that.
5. Lastly, wait for the operation to do its work. Don’t disconnect the external drive, close your laptop lid, or turn off your computer until it’s finished. It shouldn’t take longer than a few minutes.

Once the secure erase program is finished, all the ghosts and crumbs of your data are truly erased, and it’s safe to throw away, recycle, or sell.

The Best SSDs We Recommend

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Matt Jancer has been in the industry for 15 years and lives in his favorite urban death maze, New York City. He’s traded words for money on behalf of more than 15 magazines. Some of his longest-running bylines were spent covering cars, motorcycles, outdoors gear, health and fitness for Car and Driver, Outside, Esquire, Smithsonian, Playboy and Wired. When he’s not writing about motorcycles and our place in the wilderness for a living, he’s writing for enjoyment, riding his motorcycle, and mountain climbing out West. He believes everyone needs at least one hobby they have none of their ego invested into, and so guitar noises and cooking smells have been known to emanate from his apartment. Oh yeah, and he thinks pigeons are way underrated.