oregonxfile wrote:
Ive discovered that if I try to use my Samsung Magician software to do a secure erase, it does not work. I've tried to boot from both a USB drive, and from a CD. Either way, it will not access my drives, even after unplugging (it usually indicates my drives are "frozen") and even after I follow the instructions to "unfreeze" my drives, it still does not allow me to secure erase them. I may not be super knowledgeable about SSDs, but I can follow instructions pretty well. Even as I do so, it will not allow a secure erase. I imagine I'm missing something, but I have no idea what.
I can't help, as very often I wasn't able to perform a secure erase using the dedicated tools (that's why I rely upon HDAT2).
oregonxfile wrote:
I've even tried to use Parted Magic, to do the same thing. Sadly, it does not support wireless keyboards/mice, when booted from a CD (again, unless I'm totally missing something). I do not have a wired keyboard/mouse.
IIRC it's a typical issue with Parted Magic and similar liveOS, like Acronis: often the culprit it's the 64bit kernel which won't work well with wireless keyboard (and sometimes with USB too: that's another reason to love it my PS/2 Cherry Brown and boards with PS/2 connector). If you rather to stick with Linux, you may either try to boot Parted Magic with the optional 32bit kernel, or you may use a different LiveOS, like Ubuntu, and then running in a terminal the command
"hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/xxx" without the quotes, and where "/dev/xxx" is your SSD (you may use GParted to know which is the SSD dev name).
oregonxfile wrote:
So, there you have it... Please don't beat me up too badly. I just still want to secure erase my primary drive, and then install Win7 on it. I want as clean of a start as I can have, and then go from there...
I've already given you my recommendation, HDAT2: up to now I was always able to secure erase any SSD (OCZ, Intel, Crucial, Seagate, Samsung) with it, so I hope it will work for you too.
Another alternative is
HDDErase, also DOS-based.
Anyway, to avoid the frozen security status, power cycle the SSD, or connect it after booting (with HDAT2 you can do both).
About other people comments, whenever you secure erase an SSD, you will consume a part (the full drive capacity) of the specced writing endurance: but from a practical standpoint, it doesn't worth at all (
any good quality SSD is currently capable of exceeding by far that rated spec).