Erasing SSD

[WaitWhaaaaat]

Quick question is there some free reliable software to erase ssd? Obviously I don't want to use linux dd and flush it with zeroes, since this will reduce health of drives.

[MrMcMuffinJr]

Just now, WaitWhaaaaat said:

Quick question is there some free reliable software to erase ssd? Obviously I don't want to use linux dd and flush it with zeroes, since this will reduce health of drives.

Do you care if the data might be able to be recovered later?

[WaitWhaaaaat]

2 minutes ago, MrMcMuffinJr said:

Do you care if the data might be able to be recovered later?

Actually yes. I've got pc from brother in law, and he gave it to me to clean it and prepare it to donate it to charity or give to some less fortunate family.

So i would have no control over that ssd.

[MrMcMuffinJr]

1 minute ago, WaitWhaaaaat said:

Actually yes. I've got pc from brother in law, and he gave it to me to clean it and prepare it to donate it to charity or give to some less fortunate family.

So i would have no control over that ssd.

Oh. I was going to suggest using diskpart which will just destroy the partition information leaving the data to be overwritten. There’s no way to know there was data unless you really tried

[Oshino Shinobu]

4 minutes ago, WaitWhaaaaat said:

Actually yes. I've got pc from brother in law, and he gave it to me to clean it and prepare it to donate it to charity or give to some less fortunate family.

So i would have no control over that ssd.

Unfortunately your options are basically either to zero the drive, or have data left on the drive that could be recovered. 

 

You can do a single zero pass natively in Windows with the below command, replacing "d:" with whatever the drive letter is and "/p:1" with however many passes you want to do. 

format d: /fs:NTFS /p:1

 

If you're okay with data being recoverable, you can just use diskpart to clean the drive. 

[WaitWhaaaaat]

3 minutes ago, MrMcMuffinJr said:

Oh. I was going to suggest using diskpart which will just destroy the partition information leaving the data to be overwritten. There’s no way to know there was data unless you really tried

The problem with charity is that this pc and it parts may end up on ebay or some other e-commerce site immediately after being donated.

[Kisai]

20 minutes ago, WaitWhaaaaat said:

Quick question is there some free reliable software to erase ssd? Obviously I don't want to use linux dd and flush it with zeroes, since this will reduce health of drives.

PCIe SSD's have a way to do that automatically (it just trips all the cells to be set to zero, rather than writing 0 to them)

https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

 

You may want to just find the manufacturer's tool for it. Most laptops have this in the BIOS as well.

 

For SSD's ONLY, secure erase is fine. For mechanical drives, no, you'd want to zero the drive.

[WaitWhaaaaat]

1 minute ago, Kisai said:

PCIe SSD's have a way to do that automatically (it just trips all the cells to be set to zero, rather than writing 0 to them)

https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

 

You may want to just find the manufacturer's tool for it. Most laptops have this in the BIOS as well.

 

For SSD's ONLY, secure erase is fine. For mechanical drives, no, you'd want to zero the drive.

Yep mechanical drives are zeroed without mercy

[shoutingsteve]

This method also takes it one step further:

https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/how-to-diskpart-eraseclean-a-drive-through-the-command-prompt-005929en/