Request A good app to secure erase SSD

[ki_2004]

Hi All,

This is a general query - I am anyways familiar with Parted Magic ISO.

I wish to know if there’s any Windows app that can easily allow me to secure erase / sanitize an SSD. Both SATA as well as NVMe.
i.e. I want to run the factory erase procedure on SSD, not traditional wipe that writes zeros on the entire drive.

I have been using parted magic but the issue is that generally the SSD is in frozen state and parted magic puts the system in sleep and recovers it to unfreeze an SSD. Some times this procedure works other times fail.
I have a few low cost SSDs that do not have any vendor utilities available.
Thanks

 

[Wichestery2k]

parted magic is the best and for Samsung use Samsumg magician and create the Samsung secure erase bootable usb

 

[Cyler]

SSDs are NOT spinner HDDs, they do not need secure wipe software or any special software and actually, it may hurt them if you force such use on an SSD.

What you can do for a quick and secure wipe is one of the things below:
1. Erase data or format and then TRIM the disk.
2. If you have sensitive data and want to be 101% sure, Encrypt the entire drive (even if it is empty), then wipe it/format it, and then TRIM but this method will be slower.
3. Every BIOS (at least the one I saw so far) has a wipe utility or secure erase utility or something similar (which essentially does what step 1 does, erase and trim)

I won't dive deeper but if you need more info about how SSD and NVMe work or what TRIM does, just ask here.

NOTE: Secure erasing with multiple passes, apart from being useless for an SSD, it may diminish its life as cheap SSDs have a fixed limited amount of writes per cell that they can do, and forcing every cell to write zeros multiple times, is really a bad idea. Multi-pass erasing may work on normal disks, but it's useless and potentially dangerous for SSDs.

 

[Elzer]

https://www.teamos.xyz/threads/parted-magic-2022-03-28-x64-iso.175905/ oo 00 oo 00 oo

...hammer or microwave...

 

[Wichestery2k]

@ki_2004 here's the latest parted magic https://www.teamos.xyz/threads/parted-magic-2024-02-06-x64-teamos.209138/

here's Samsung Magician if your drive is a Samsung https://www.teamos.xyz/threads/samsung-ssd-magician-7-3-0-1100-teamos.195154/
don't update to version 8, they don't work!

 

[ki_2004]

Dear All.
Thank you so much for your responses.
As I mentioned, I found parted magic unreliable, I have tried many versions. It sometimes fails to unfreeze SSD.
I have many non Samsung SSDs for which proprietary tools do not work well.

Edit 1 - It seems a generic tool I have imagined on Windows does not exist. I will stick to Linux hdparm commands for now. I believe parted magic might be internally using the same but somehow I did not find it reliable with frozen and not-frozen state of SSDs.