SSD – Resolving Stalls During Windows 2003 Installation

Late answer to my own question. It appears that Intel's SSD drives had (have?) a problem after the system wakes up. This has been reported on several forums, but Intel hasn't any mention of it themselves.

Solution is rather sore: buy a new SSD.

Unfortunately, Intel SSD's cannot be repaired by special repair companies because its contents is encrypted by a proprietary (?) encryption format. That too is not publicly mentioned by Intel as far as I can tell.

Assuming that what you are seeking to prevent is the next customer reading the disk to see the old customer's data, then writing all zeros would actually still work. Writing zeros to sector 'n' means that when sector 'n' is read, it will return all zeros. Now the fact is, the underlying actual data may still be on the flash chips, but since you can't do a normal read to get to it, it's not a problem for your situation.

It IS a problem if someone can physically get hold of the disk and take it apart (because then they could directly read the flash chips), but if the only access they have is the SATA bus, then a write of all zeros to the whole disk will do just fine.