Best way to format a SSD??

How do you format a SSD? Just simply say for starting fresh or if you were to sell it and dont want information to be uncovered etc. I know SSDs with trim delete right? Can just zeroing out the drive be fine or does it need to be written 7 times or something?

 

For using it by yourself, just do a quick format of the partition(s).
If you want to sell it, do a "Secure Erase" and all data on the SSD is gone and can't be recovered.

 

You format the drive like you format any other drive.

If you are selling the drive and want to destroy all traces of your previous data, then a regular full format will be fine. It will write 0's to all blocks of the SSD.

You do not need to do secure-erase methods that repeatedly write 0's to the drive across multiple passes. That method is only intended for mechanical HDD's, which can retain a magnetic signature of previously stored information even after it has been overwritten. SSD's do not store data using magnetic encoding, so there is no "ghost" data to recover once a sector has been overwritten.

And FYI - usually these kinds of full erases are necessary only if you are worried about federal regulations like HIPAA, FERPA, SOX, etc. If you're just one guy selling a drive to another guy, it's probably unnecessary. Regular users aren't going to spend the thousands of dollars it costs to recover data from a drive just to look at your old credit card statements or find a 2-year old email that you sent to your girlfriend. The reality is that most people aren't important enough to be worth it to attack their data.

 

If it is a Sandforce drive, a secure erase is a good idea, to reset the Durawrite (if any). That's a specific case, though, otherwise a regular format is probably enough, yes.