On a MacBook Pro, with OSX, after installing a 3rd party SSD, there is no option to issue a “Secure Erase” and only “Format” is offered. After formatting the drive (prior to selling the MacBook) – I was able to recover hundreds of photos and other documents using this freeware tool. Test Disk. Run the tool as “photorec” to access the Photo Recovery features.
To get around this I overwrote the partition with /dev/random. Since the /dev/random device is bounded by CPU – you’ll want to stop the Mac from sleeping during the process by issuing
sudo systemsetup -setcomputersleep Never
Before formatting, there are lots of personal family photos that are recoverable by anyone who goes looking. After formatting, the only images available are the default graphics put onto disk during OS-X install.