![]() ![]() Buy Parted Magic and Download its ISO file. If you are planning to wipe disks on a regular basis or you want to make sure the OP area is wiped, we definitely recommend Parted Magic, but otherwise, you should consider a free method like using Windows Diskpart, which we describe below.ġ. However, the utility starts at $15 and does not have a free trial period. If you don't have a free manufacturer's utility or a motherboard with a secure erase function in the BIOS, Parted Magic, a bootable Linux environment with secure erase utilities built-in, will do it for you. Parted Magic is the best universal secure erase utility around. How to Securely Erase Your SSD with Parted Magic We haven't tested to see if all of these have secure erase features that work with all of their drives. Here's some quick links to manufacturers' software you can try. For example, we had a Kingston Rage Fury M.2 NVMe SSD but found that Kingston's software would only secure erase the company's SATA drives. The method and capabilities vary for each manufacturer's software. Note that if the drive you are wiping is the boot drive in the PC you are using to clear it, you will need a utility that can create a bootable USB erasure tool. (Image credit: Future) How to Securely Erase Your SSD with a Manufacturer's Utilityĭepending on the make and model of your SSD, the manufacturer (ex: Samsung) may have a free utility that will allow you to perform an official "secure erase," resetting the blocks. On our Asus ROG motherboard, the option was under Tool->Asus Secure Erase. If you can't find one, consult the user manual. Look for a secure erase option under a tools or storage menu. See our article on how to enter your BIOS if you haven't done this before.Ģ. On each brand of motherboard, the secure erase feature may have a different name and a different location in the menu structure.ġ. If your SSD is the boot drive in the PC you are wiping, the easiest way to securely erase it is through your motherboard's UEFI BIOS. How to Securely Erase Your SSD via Your Motherboard A paid utility called Parted Magic can do secure wipes for you, but if you don't want to spend money, Windows 10 and 11 have a tool called diskpart which does a good job for free. ![]() But your particular drive or motherboard may not have these options available. These tools effectively reset your SSD to a factory state, with even the OP blocks wiped. Some SSD makers provide secure erase utilities for free and some motherboard BIOSes have "secure erase" capability built in. What you need is a utility that can quickly get at all the visible data. Therefore, it's unlikely someone would be able to get to those blocks using consumer-grade recovery software (a government agency might be able to, however). However, since the over provisioned blocks are out of circulation, they won't be used (or visible to software) again until they've already been overwritten. A full drive overwrite wouldn't touch these blocks, which could have data in them. So there might be 5 or 10 percent of blocks that are unavailable to the OS at any given time. SSDs use overprovisioning to extend the life of the drive and replace any blocks that fail over time. Hard drives need multiple overwrites because magnetic media can leave remnants of data, but all SSDs have a limited number of write cycles so overwriting them multiple times will harm the drive's longevity and may not even wipe the files you want to get rid of. This brute-force overwrite method won't work as well for SSDs. The best way to erase an HDD, which we'll cover in more detail below, is to use a program that writes random data over all the sectors several times so that no remnants of the old files remain. ![]() Refer to your operating system support for specific instructions and risks around these changes, but be aware that if an adjustment seems especially invasive or of limited usefulness, they are not necessary for general use of your SSD as a high-performance storage device.Securely erasing an SSD is different than doing the same process on a mechanical hard drive. Also, several of these changes are more involved than some users may be comfortable with adjusting on their own. ![]() Suggestions such as enabling AHCI mode and modifying write-cache buffer flushing settings may improve performance or stability, though are not beneficial for all users and may not be possible in some host systems. This screen also identifies possible performance optimizations which can be made in Windows. zip archives in the directory Storage Executive is installed under. Individual Drive Details screens provide more drive information, including a value for Total Bytes Written to allow monitoring of NAND write-wear, as well as what driver and interface the SSD is utilizing.Ī drop-down menu on this screen (in the upper-left) provides a Get Debug Data option for your system, which will generate error logs and may be requested by Crucial Support for diagnostics of system malfunctions. ![]()
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