Secure Erase SSD, easy right?

porina · February 20, 2019

I got an Adata SP550 from a PC I bought used. I thought I'd Secure Erase it before using it in a build which I'm giving away. There's nothing on it I care about, but just to be extra careful since I don't know what was on the drive before I got it myself.

Anyway, I download Adata's tool, which has a Secure Erase function. Doesn't work in Win10. Ok, moved it over to a Win7 system. Drive is Frozen. It tells me to hot plug it. Ok... in short, that just made the drive disappear from Windows until I rebooted. I turn on hot-plug mode for that device, and tried again. I tried removing only power cable, only data cable, both, it still remains frozen after re-detection.

At this point I'm wondering if it is worth spending more time on. As an alternative, I could create a single large partition on it, and use the Windows defragmenter "optimise" function, which I think TRIMs filesystem level free space on the SSD. The functional difference between this and a proper Secure Erase I think is that it doesn't guarantee I erase any over-provisioning, and there isn't a guarantee when the TRIM is actually performed by the drive, as it may defer it. In essence, it only marks the area as ready to be TRIM'd. Probably would be good enough.

Any last suggestions before I give up?

NinJake · February 20, 2019

Try having it plugged in your system and use a live linux distro on a USB drive to try and secure erase there.

Firewrath9 · February 20, 2019

wtf is "secure erase"

just format it, and do a full drive write, then reformat.

Alex Atkin UK · February 20, 2019

AFAIK just filling the drive with content you don't care about should make the old data impossible to recover, assuming TRIM hasn't done that already.

paddy-stone · February 20, 2019

Agree, worst case scenario, just fill it with crap. EASUS partition master has a "wipe partition" option, where you can enter the amount of times you want the data wiped... don't know how effective it is, but might be worth a shot? Free Download EaseUS Partition Manager Software for Windows PC, Workstation and Server.

porina · February 20, 2019

If you don't know what Secure Erase is, replying to this thread isn't helping. Writing data onto the drive is possibly the worst way to do it. It would kinda work, but just adds wear. I might as well stick to full drive TRIM in that case which doesn't add the unnecessary wear.

Can't be arsed to make a Linux boot drive, and it would almost certainly have the same problem anyway, as the freezing of a drive I understand happens on boot. In searching around, it sounds like some mobo bios has Secure Erase function in it, but I haven't see it in the two systems I looked at so far.