I'm getting rid of a couple of early Macs that are pre-T2 and would like to donate one (2013 iMac) and sell the other (2017 MacBook Pro). Neither were encrypted by FileVault before erasure. I understand why SSDs don't have the same overwrite mechanism as the earlier magnetic drives. I also know that post-T2 and now, Apple Silicon, the hard drives are encrypted by default. I believe that, like a modern iPhone, when one does an erase all content that it trashes the encryption keys and redoes them, effectively rendering the data unreadable. However, for SSDs without said encryption (or FileVault turned on) if I erase from Disk Utility and reformat the drive, how secure is the erase? I've read some people say that SSD data recovery for drives with TRIM enabled that have been told to erase themselves and reformat from disk utility is basically impossible encryption or not - in fact that ATA Secure Erase is the same thing as a full device TRIM. But others have said that ATA Secretary Erase/TRIM is not really that secure. I'm not capable of judging those claims and most of those people are unknown to me so I'd like to solicit some knowledge here (and please feel free the correct anything else I've sad that might be wrong).
For the Mac with the Fusion drive of course I'm SOL unless I go into terminal from Recovery and manually erase the magnetic hard drive with multiple 0s and 1s even if the SSD portion is basically gone. Which I might do, though the 2013 iMac with said drive is so old that I do wonder if even donating it to charity is worth it for the charity and especially I'm especially leery if I haven't securely erased the drive.
For the Mac with the Fusion drive of course I'm SOL unless I go into terminal from Recovery and manually erase the magnetic hard drive with multiple 0s and 1s even if the SSD portion is basically gone. Which I might do, though the 2013 iMac with said drive is so old that I do wonder if even donating it to charity is worth it for the charity and especially I'm especially leery if I haven't securely erased the drive.