Magnets wipe SSDs like old hard drives
Hard disk drives store data magnetically and can be wiped by degaussing. SSDs use electronic flash memory cells and have no magnetic media. A magnet, even a strong one, cannot erase or damage SSD storage.
What we know
Degaussing is a data-destruction method that exposes a storage device to a powerful magnetic field to scramble the magnetic domains that encode data. It works reliably on hard disk drives because HDDs store information as magnetic patterns on spinning platters. It does not work on solid-state drives, because SSDs store data as electrical charge trapped in NAND flash memory cells, a fundamentally different physical mechanism that has nothing to do with magnetism.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology addressed this directly in NIST Special Publication 800-88, its guidelines for media sanitization. NIST explicitly states that degaussing is not an approved method for sanitizing flash-based storage such as SSDs, USB drives, and memory cards, precisely because these devices are not magnetic media. Running an SSD through a commercial degausser will not reliably erase or damage the data stored on its flash chips, even though the same device would instantly and irreversibly destroy a hard drive.
This misconception matters in practice because organizations that recycle or dispose of old computers sometimes assume a single degaussing process handles all storage types. If an SSD is degaussed and then discarded on that assumption, sensitive data can remain fully recoverable. NIST 800-88 instead recommends cryptographic erasure (erasing the encryption key that protects the data), the ATA Secure Erase or NVMe Sanitize commands built into most modern SSD firmware, or physical destruction such as shredding, disintegration, or incineration for drives that must be guaranteed unrecoverable.
The confusion exists because degaussing was the standard, well-understood method for decades when hard drives dominated storage, and the word became shorthand for 'securely erase' in many IT departments long before SSDs became common. As flash storage has largely replaced spinning disks in laptops, phones, and many servers since the early 2010s, the specific method of destruction needs to match the specific storage technology, not a habit carried over from an earlier generation of hardware. Data recovery specialists who have tested degaussed SSDs in controlled settings confirm that flash memory chips subjected to strong magnetic fields typically show no data loss at all, since the charge trapped in each memory cell is unaffected by an external magnetic field in the way a hard drive's magnetic platter would be. This means an organization that believes it has securely destroyed data on an SSD through degaussing may still have a fully intact, recoverable drive sitting in an e-waste bin, a scenario that has led to real data breaches when discarded drives were later recovered by third parties. IT asset disposal firms that handle bulk equipment recycling now train staff specifically on this distinction, since treating all drives with a single degaussing step remains one of the more common compliance failures identified during data-security audits of decommissioned hardware.
Common claims
- Degaussing an SSD erases its data the way it does on a hard drive.Not supported
- SSDs store data magnetically like hard drives.Not supported
- Cryptographic erase or Secure Erase commands are effective for SSDs.Supported