Secure SSD Erasure

[Adamsavage79]

Do you guys have a program or method of Secure Wiping a SSD, before doing a fresh install ? My buddy who is fairly techy, and knows his stuf, has suggested I secure wipe my SSD before doing my planned install of Windows this week. I do have one program already, and it's on CD. It's called DBAN.

From the text file, on the Cd I have burned:

dod Wipe all disks with the DoD 5220.22-M method.
dodshort Wipe all disks with the short DoD 5220.22-M method. (Default.)
ops2 Wipe all disks with the RCMP TSSIT OPS-II method.
gutmann Wipe all disks with the Gutmann method.
prng Wipe all disks with the PRNG Stream method.
quick Wipe all disks with the Quick Erase method.

 

[Sysnative Windows Update]

That's a total overkill.
Samsung Magician has a Secure Erase Option if I'm not mistaken, but what's wrong with good old formatting?

 

[Adamsavage79]

That's a total overkill.
Samsung Magician has a Secure Erase Option if I'm not mistaken, but what's wrong with good old formatting?

I was wondering myself. He says Secure Erase is to "Reset the drive"

 

[xilolee]

I also don't think that's necessary...
What's the purpose of a wipe, given that you are going to remove all the partitions, to create new ones and to install windows anew (and you aren't going to bin the SSD)?

 

[Adamsavage79]

I also don't think that's necessary...
What's the purpose of a wipe, given that you are going to remove all the partitions, to create new ones and to install windows anew (and you aren't going to bin the SSD)?

Not sure ? I guess just a normal format will do. The act of installing Windows alone would make it difficult for any sort of file recovery, if I was worried about that. Which I'm not. I just need to remove windows and everything on the drive and start over with Windows.

 

[Digerati]

Wiping a SSD with programs like DBAM do not work on SSDs anyway. This is because wear-leveling, a feature only used by SSDs, distributes writes evenly across every location so one location is not used more than another. Wipe programs work by writing a bunch of random 1s and 0s to storage locations. Wear-leveling will prevent reaching each location.

Plus, the purpose of writing those 1s and 0s is to obliterate any residual magnetism on the disk platters that forensic recovery tools may be able to pick up. SSDs don't use magnetic particles.

Last, the purpose of using a wipe program is to prevent a new owner (or thief/badguy) of the hard drive from discovering any previously stored data. It does NOT make reinstalling Windows go any better.

If you want to start from a "fresh" or clean drive (SSD or HD) just do a quick format first. This will mark all the storage locations as available.