Securely disposing of an mSATA SSD?

One of my laptops just died. Normally that'd mean removing the hard drive, breaking out the hammer and sending the rest to a recycling depot, but I don't think the hammer thing will work for an mSATA SSD...

I have no other devices with an mSATA slot, so I can't do a swap and Secure Erase either

 

It should be very easy to crunch the chips on an mSATA SSD so that they become unreadable.

However, before you do this, I would suggest you consider the alternative of keeping the SSD. You never know when you will discover that you need something that is on it.

John

 

It's a 64 GB drive. If it were, say, a 256 GB drive I'd buy an SATA adapter for it and use it somewhere, but at 64 GB the adapter costs as much as a brand new SSD would.

 

Peon, even decent adapter to 2.5" costs less than $5 - unless you want to put couple such drives in 2.5" enclosure and go RAID.

 

Alternatively, buy a mSATA enclosure and use it as a USB drive.

 

First of all, there is no reason for a consumer to physically destroy any sort of hard drive. Secondly, yes, a hammer will destroy it.

 

Send it to me and I'll make good use of it! If you are really concerned, just download a program called Eraser, and you can run a DoD Standard 3-pass wipe on the drive, or the Air Force method or Russian GOST or several other methods to choose from. Nothing will be recoverable at that point. I've never not been able to erase a drive with Eraser. If you STILL cannot, just download DBAN and put it on a USB flash drive and have it do the DoD 3 pass erase

 

Those things are technically not secure on a SSD, but in practice they might be good enough for personal use.

 

As the others said - use it as an external memory. OR if you're still set on wasting it - put some juice through the data pins (23, 25, 31, 33) granted you'll never be able to use or recover data out of this poor mSATA ever again. How do I know? That's how I wasted my M500 mSATA 240GB drive. You can still use the hammer afterwards, just to be sure

 

Intentionally or different slot? Inebriated ?

 

Sadly it was while me and a friend were making the two mSATA slots I have now in my 8740w. The power wire came loose (after A LOT of testing and putting the slot at various places) touched the data lines and there goes the drive. But as I said, at least I know how to wipe a drive now

 

Where did you get yours? The cheapest non-ebay ones I could find with a 2 minute search are ~$30.

 

Peon, I recommend this; managed to buy for $4.77 some time ago from another seller who had a temporary discount. I also have this lying around - more suitable for a desktop replacement rarely moved around rather than a tablet, in my opinion. If you're eager to spend $30 and feeling adventurous, try this - TRIM won't work in this enclosure, though, and JBOD only over USB. You may also be interested in this cable.

 

A mSATA to SATA adapter is purely wiring, there is no logic circuit involved. I really don't see how an eBay one could go wrong.