Does full disk encryption securely remove data?

Question

I was just catching up on best practices for securely erasing data from a Mac. At one point I remember reading:

For SSD drives it is no longer recommended to fully write ones/zeroes/random bits on the disk. Use encryption instead.

Now, I am thinking of two starting points:

1. Your disk was not encrypted
2. Your disk was encrypted, but you are not sure if the new owner had the key

In both cases giving the laptop to the new owner would not be secure, deleting everything beforehand is a good step (and in practice strong enough for me personally) but I am not sure if that is sufficient.

Now my question:

Suppose you have one of these two starting points, THEN you erase the drive normally and format it to be encrypted, are you then secure?

The 'threat' I was worried about, is that the new owner would be able to format it back to the old way (e.g. without encryption, or with a specific encryption key) and it might be possible to use classical data retrieval techniques.

Perhaps it does not work like this (or it depends on the hardware), but I am hoping to understand if encryption of a disk means its previous contents can also not be retrieved anymore.

Answer 1

If you store data on an SSD and then encrypt it, some unencrypted residue may still be present in the flash chips (it's not accessible through the normal storage protocol - SATA/SAS/NVMe/USB - though). The more the SSD is written to after encryption and the more completely it is filled, the smaller that residue gets.

The exact amount depends on the flash controller's wear-leveling algorithm and the (spare) capacity of the SSD. Most often, you don't know much about that and can only guess.

So no, you're not entirely secure encrypting an SSD after sensitive data has been written to it without encryption.

Usually, you encrypt a drive right after installation and only then do you write sensitive data to it.

Some drives have a secure erase feature that allows you to kill all data at a low level.

And of course, if you want to erase a disk (HDD or SSD), all blocks need to be overwritten (multiple times for SSD as outlined above, one time for HDD is sufficient). Deleting files, quick formating, or deleting a partition all don't really remove data from the drive and can largely be undone.