Just curious as I want to replace my original Steam Deck before the OLED releases.
Is a Steam Deck safe to sell after performing a factory reset? As in, will the next owner be able to obtain any passwords to my steam account or any other account/personal details?
Thanks in advance!
Random writes and/or multiple zero-fills are just a waste of time. They don’t achieve anything, they’re just a placebo. Plenty of people/procedures recommend to do it, but they’re absolutely pointless in the real world. Once your disk is full of zeros, it doesn’t matter what came before.
Don’t trust me? If the US government was unable to recover the content of a drive related to Julian Assange’s case after a single zero-fill, I think you’re safe:
In the case of an SSD, random writes or zero-fills don’t work at all, though: they are not guaranteed to actually fill the disk with zeros (and most likely won’t), while at the same time wear the drive. For SSDs, you should run a secure erase command that’ll instruct the SSD to reset all its cells to their default state.