Best way to secure erase external 2TB Samsung SSD drive before returning it?

Much simpler than that. In a terminal window, enter the following command:

ls /Volumes

The list you get back has the potential targets for @ron 's command. For example, on my computer, I get:

12:17 PM ~ > ls /Volumes
Macintosh HD	Time Machine

Because I have only my internal boot drive (Macintosh HD) and one external drive (Time Machine). So lets imagine when you run this command on your computer, the result is:

12:17 PM ~ > ls /Volumes
Macintosh HD	Time Machine    TroublesomeSSD

There’s the name of the drive you need to target for the cat command. So the complete command would be:

cat </dev/zero >/Volumes/TroublesomeSSD/bigtempfile

And I should add, if the name of your drive has a space in it, you’ll need to escape that in the command, like so:

cat </dev/zero >/Volumes/Troublesome\ SSD/bigtempfile
4 Likes