Selling old Mac - SSD erased too quickly

[AMSOS]

i am selling my old Mac (128 GB SSD) and wanted to erase the internal SDD before sending it away.

I went into system recovery and erased and renamed the main disc partition. However, I was surprised to see that it took barely a few seconds for the disc to be erased.

This makes me suspect that my data is still there and can be recovered using third party specialised softwares. The internal disc is not encrypted.

I am now again in recovery mode and this time the dick utility is coming up but I see that the "security options" button is greyed out.

I was checking online and it seems a 7 pass or more erase can seriously shorten the life of the disc.

I am not sure what to do. Should I just send it away with the erase I've already done?

Thanks!

 

[Tumbleweed666]

A 7 pass erase will not shorten the life of an SSD. This is scaremongering / bad info from the very early days of SSD 20 years ago and more.
I don't know why a secure erase is greyed out , why not just reinstall, set disk encryption on, and then fill up the disk by repeatedly copying the same file and then erase that and switch encryption off

 

[AMSOS]

A 7 pass erase will not shorten the life of an SSD. This is scaremongering / bad info from the very early days of SSD 20 years ago and more.
I don't know why a secure erase is greyed out , why not just reinstall, set disk encryption on, and then fill up the disk by repeatedly copying the same file and then erase that and switch encryption off

I was checking some other threads and I am definitely confused because there are lots of people on both sides of the fence. I mean several are saying that even one-pass is good enough for most situations. I noticed that those who went for 7-pass did so more to reassure themselves.
I am a regular user with no hyper sensitive data. Of course that doesn't mean I want my research or other notes falling in someone else's hands.
Do you think I'll mostly be fine if I go with 1-pass?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Isn't multi-pass erasure just for spinner drives…to prevent forensic-type reclamation of data that could possibly remain because the magnetic image of data might still be on the platter?

SSDs don't have magnetic platters.

I used Samsung's own secure erase utility (which I think was a bootable Linux image) to erase one of their SSDs and it only took a second.

 

[mikzn]

I thought the HDD drives had a directory / reference file that if deleted made finding any specific file almost impossible - except with special software that basically built a new reference file after extensively searching, cataloguing and building a new reference file from the damaged or erased drive?

Is this different with a SSD drive?