“How do you wipe an SSD drive” is a common internet search these days, ranking alongside queries such as “How do you erase a hard drive?”, “How do I wipe my hard drive clean without a disk?”, and “How do you scan your hard drive for viruses?”
- How To Wipe Ssd Safe
- How To Securely Erase Hdd
- How To Wipe Ssd With Windows 10
- How To Wipe Ssd By Unplug
- How To Wipe Ssd
- How To Wipe Ssd Reddit
NAND-based flash storage is increasingly becoming popular due to the superior benefits it offers over magnetic discs, but how do you wipe an SSD drive at the end of its life cycle?
- Erased SSD with Diskpart Command Prompt You can also try CMD command prompt to erase your SSD, while you should be careful, check the capacity of your SSD, avoid choosing a wrong disk, which will cause you big trouble. And when you type word on the CMD window, you need to be careful. Step1: Run CMD on your Windows system.
- Reset Your SSD with Windows ® DiskPart These steps show you how to use the Windows DiskPart Clean command to quickly delete any partitions on the SSD and reset it to an uninitialized state. Follow the steps here to reinitialize your drive after resetting it with Windows DiskPart Clean.
How to wipe your Windows computer After your hard drive is encrypted — or if you don't need to encrypt it — you can use Windows to wipe your PC, setting it back to its factory defaults.
For all their benefits, SSDs can present some unusual problems when it comes to securely sanitize them at the time of decommissioning. To begin with, none of the proven and widely used hard drive data wiping techniques are effective on SDDs. This makes the process of securely wiping an SSD is a whole new ball game.
Before we highlight a couple of trusted and secure techniques for wiping SSDs, it’s important to understand a few unique characteristics of SSD data storage and why they present sanitization issues.
Unique Characteristics of SSDs
How To Wipe Ssd Safe
One of the biggest advantages of NAND flash storage is the ability to retain data without being powered up (hence the reference non-volatile memory). However, this benefit comes at the cost of a limited lifetime. In other words, NAND flash memory can be written to only a finite number of times because it wears out over time. What’s more, the flash wears out unevenly, causing some parts to wear out faster than others.
To circumvent this problem, SSDs employ wear-leveling algorithms to try to prolong their lifespan. The SSD continually moves data across the drive to ensure that the different areas of the flash chip wear out uniformly.
As such, using traditional wiping techniques to overwrite a specific block over countless times doesn’t necessarily work here because the SSD writes all fresh incoming data to different blocks spread across the drive. Employing hard drive wiping techniques on SSDs may, in fact, harm them.
Secure Methods For Wiping SSDs
Built-in Purge Functionality
A number of SSDs now come with built-in purge functionality. Basically, the purge feature restores the drive’s original state as at the time of manufacture, essentially wiping all the data. If your solid-state drives hold non-sensitive data, the built-in purge functionality is a sufficient method of wiping the drive. Otherwise – when wondering how do you wipe an SSD drive – you might want to try another foolproof method.
Overwrite Techniques
In classic hard drive disposition, one of the most commonly used wiping techniques is repeated overwrite. In this technique, a special program is used to overwrite parts of the drive (or the entire drive) with a series of patterns repeatedly.
Overwrite techniques can also be used to wipe SSDs through the use of IO commands to overwrite every individual block on the drive. That being said, this wiping method gives poor results in SSDs so it should not be solely relied on.
Physical Shredding
Shredding is a technique that’s highly relied on for complete hard drive data destruction. However, for SSDs, a typical hard drive shredder may not be sufficient to totally wipe the data from existence. Integrated circuit (IC) chips on SSDs can remain intact after shredding, which means the data they hold can still be recovered.
Cryptographic Erasure
Most SSDs encrypt data by default as a security measure. As such, one technique to sanitize the drive is to alter the encryption and decryption key used on the data. However, if not properly implemented, the data on the drive remains vulnerable. It may also not be possible to verify whether the drive has been wiped.
So How Do You Wipe An SSD Drive?
As data protection laws get increasingly tighter, secure disposal of data is now more critical than ever before. The best way to ensure compliance and eliminate any risks is by entrusting a professional data destruction service with your SSD destruction needs.
When you have sensitive data held on decommissioned SSDs and you’re wondering how do you wipe an SSD drive, you need a proven and trusted SSD erasure solution that only a proven professional service can guarantee.
Have you ever tried wiping an SSD drive yourself? How did it turn out? Let us know in the comments below.
References
When you attempt you prepare your storage device for a new user, you may need to secure erase the SSD or HDD to protect your private data. What is secure erase and how to do it? Read on and you will know all about it.
What Is Secure Erase
How To Securely Erase Hdd
Secure Erase is, in essence, a set of commands that are available from the firmware on PATA/SATA based hard drives. It is a term for a data sanitation method that completely overwrites all of the data on a hard drive by writing a binary one or zero to the sectors on the storage device. That means once you perform a Secure Erase, there will be no chance to recover data from the device. But from a different perspective, Secure Erase is a perfect way to prepare your storage device for reuse or resale.
Can You Secure Erase SSD
Yes, you can. But only with the help of an SSD erasing tool or utility. Since the Secure Erase commands are only available from the hard drive firmware, you can not run the commands as you do in Command Prompt. How to erase all content on usb flash drive. Therefore, you will need a hard drive erasing tool to help you to secure erase your solid-state drive.
The Tool You Need - Free SSD Erase Tool
The free partition manager - EaseUS Partition Master, can also serve the function of an SSD erasing tool to securely erase an SSD or HDD for you. The 'Wipe Data' feature works almost identical to the Secure Erase commands. The only difference is that the free tool erases your data permanently by writing random numbers, not binary one or zero. No matter what the process is, the outcome is the same: your SSD or HDD will be securely wiped out.
How to Secure Erase SSD or HDD
Do make sure you have backed up all the needed files on the hard drive you are going to erase. To back up a whole disk effectively, you can use the free backup software to do it for you. Once it's done, the data stored will be lost forever.
How To Wipe Ssd With Windows 10
To secure erase an SSD or HDD with the free SSD erasing tool:
Step 1: Install and launch EaseUS Partition Master.
How can i transfer contacts from android to laptop. Select the HDD or SSD which you want to wipe. And right-click to choose 'Wipe Data'.
![How to wipe ssd drives How to wipe ssd drives](https://www.blueridgenow.com/storyimage/NC/20030526/News/606049968/AR/0/AR-606049968.jpg)
Step 2: Set the number of times to wipe data.
You can set to 10 at most. Then Click 'OK'.
How To Wipe Ssd By Unplug
Step 3: Check the message.
A message tells you that the computer would restart after disk erase is recommended. Fnaf how to beat night 5. Then click 'OK'.
Step 4: Click 'Apply' to apply the changes.
Click 'Execute the operation' and then click 'Apply' to start wiping data.
The time it will take to wipe out an SSD or HDD varies, depending on the capacity of your SSD or HDD. Generally, it's longer than simply delete files due to the additional overwriting process. Thus, if you have a large-size disk to wipe, wait patiently for the process to complete.
EaseUS Partition Master is powerful software that will fulfill many of your disk-related needs. With the free software installed, you can:
- Resize partitions to allocate your disk space according to your needs
- Merge partitions to expand the storage
- Create/format/delete partitions to prepare the space of reuse
- Convert the disk/partition between primary and logical, MBR and GPT, or from FAT to NTFS
How To Wipe Ssd
If you upgrade to the Pro version, there will be more useful features available, like OS migration, partition recovery, and bootable disk creation.
Knowledge Base: Does Secure Erase Damage SSD
That depends on how many times does the Secure Erase overwrite the cells on the disk. Too many overwrites might lower the lifespan of the SSD. But don't fret. Just wiping the SSD three or five times won't really do much damage to the SSD. Thus, feel free to secure erase the SSD because there is no detrimental effect on the storage device as you may expect.
The Bottom Line
How To Wipe Ssd Reddit
Secure Erase can securely wipe out your SSD or HDD and make the data unrecoverable. Given that, it's a good choice when you want to sanitize the drive and recover its performance. The free SSD erasing tool from EaseUS not only allows you to securely erase your SSD or HDD with simple clicks but also enables you to back up the whole disk quickly before the cleanup when necessary.