Your subject says Latest System but you posted in the "Mac OS X 10.0 - 10.5.x" forum, so I'm a tad confused. Exactly which OS are you asking about? And for the sake of thoroughness, which Mac?
It's the SSD—Secure Erase and Erase Free Space are not available in Disk Utility for SSDs. Apple claims that "[t]hese options are not needed for an SSD drive because a standard erase makes it difficult to recover data from an SSD," but the truth is a little more complicated. See Secure erase data on a Solid State Drive? for more info.
dkmarsh—member, FineTunedMac Co-op Board of Directors
Thanks, followed the link to the slashdot article http://beta.slashdot.org/story/147848. Pretty much explains it. It sounds like you really can't erase free space either, a problem that was solved when one of my 'analog' backup drives was churning all the time and had a feeling there was something there it didn't "like." Erasing the free space quieted it down. I'm not trying to erase for security reasons. I need to reinstall everything on the drive because my first transfer of user data found corrupted data from the previous computer. Having seen that churning on my external able to be resolved by wiping free space, I have concerns that the corrupt files from the previous attempt could come back to bite me. Not a great beginning...
Last edited by slolerner; 01/30/1401:43 AM. Reason: added link