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 also 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 is overkill. 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. Securely erasing an SSD is different than doing the same process on a mechanical hard drive.
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