I am facing a problem that will confront an increasing number of Mac SSD users when they reach the point of replacing their current machines.

As my 2008 Rev B MacBook Air SSD is getting very full, and very slow, I have been looking at ways of either replacing the drive or possibly selling the Air and buying a new one- hopefully with the next generation which should have a backlit keyboard and lightpeak. Of course unless I buy a new bigger drive (can't find any) , the existing 128Gb drive will need to be securely erased as it contains a lot of business data which I really don't want to pass on to some random individual. This is where the problems start. My research on the net and with Apple support, do not reveal any solution that will really wipe the drive and return it to effectively its new state. In view of the cost of these drives, this is quite a serious penalty as the only currently available solution is buy a replacement 128 Gb drive and subject the old one to the 'Will it Blend' treatment. Does anyone have a better idea?


Regards Isidore

What about Disk Utility? (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility)
You can write up to 35 times over your data. I'm pretty sure that's safe enough.
[edit]moved the topic to the relevant section

That is the problem! Due to the way that ssd manage their reading and writing, Disk utility does not actually work with an ssd. There are some interesting threads on this on Macrumors.

It is indeed impossible to completely wipe out 100% of the data stored on an SSD, even when using some special programs. However, if you format it and write a few times over it, it will be hard enough for the next user of your SSD to find anything more than a few MBs of data scattered around the drive, but it won't be usable.