Advise - Erasing a NVME SSD?

Failing that you can get Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office for £6.99 for one year with the purchase of a Crucial P3 or P3 Plus SSD from a certain online retailer. After one year it’s £34.99 but you can cancel at anytime.

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/true-image/

It was formerly known as Acronis True Image and will securely erase an SSD. It’s also a great way to backup, clone and restore partitions etc.
 
If your bios doesn't have secure erase
Look for the older version of parted magic
Older version is still free
It has a great secure erase feature
For sata ssds and m2/nvme

Other option look for the manufacturers software
If samsung then samsung magician etc
They should have secure erase

Which ever method you use
I suggest run a recovery software afterwards to double check
In the past I used corsair secure erase
Tested afterwards
And it did not securely erase it at all
Could still recover stuff

With parted magic nothing was recoverable
 
Mcnumpty2323 said:
If your bios doesn't have secure erase
Look for the older version of parted magic
Older version is still free
It has a great secure erase feature
For sata ssds and m2/nvme

Other option look for the manufacturers software
If samsung then samsung magician etc
They should have secure erase

Which ever method you use
I suggest run a recovery software afterwards to double check
In the past I used corsair secure erase
Tested afterwards
And it did not securely erase it at all
Could still recover stuff

With parted magic nothing was recoverable
Click to expand...
THIS!
 
And should say
I have tried a lot of things to secure erase m2/nvme drives
From way back when they first came out
No bios or manufacturers secure erase options then
Command prompt and Linux were only options
Until I finally found parted magic
Even if you can't find the free version
The pay for version is pretty cheap
Given it worked perfectly for me
And biggest benefit it didn't care which manufacturers m2
I tested it on
 
Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office 2023 available for £15.60 on a Black Friday deal on a certain online retailers website, 1 year term no need to cancel. Much better than the usual £34.99 and not a lot more than the £6.99 offer with a new Crucial P3 or P3 Plus drive.
 
I actually have acronis
Came free with something I bought
Only my personal experience
But I can't even launch it
Comes up with some acronis scheduling error
Found it was an issue on acronis support
They gave 2 files to download and replace
2 files in the acronis folder
didn't cure it for me
So from personal experience
I can't recommend it
Windows 11 and Windows 11 latest preview version
We're what I tested it in
 
I still use Acronis True Image but stopped updating with 2019 as the later versions became Home Office and were reported as buggy on the Acronis forum. I use its inbuilt drive-cleanser and hope for the best.....
 
Other than formatting the drive i honestly wouldn't bother, that is unless you have confidential and/or incriminating data on it.

The chances of whoever you sell it to being bothered or even having the knowledge to recover data from it are pretty low.
 
I would have to disagree with that
A simple format just isn't enough
Some people save passwords etc to make
Logging into websites, Facebook etc easier
Software keys may also be saved on there
The knowledge needed to run basic recovery software
Is almost none
Files can easily be recovered after format
It just marks them as unavailable
Nothings been overwritten to them
I have even recovered files after someone reinstalled windows
as it still didnt overwrite where the files were stored
on the drive

Maybe I am over cautious
But better safe than sorry is my approach
 
Samsung Magician allows you to create a bootable USB drive to Secure Erase an SSD.

PS. I've used this a couple of times and it appears to work just fine.
 
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I've never tried to recover something from an SSD. Would it not be basically all over for the data, when deleted and TRIM command had been ran? I genuinely don't know, just always assumed if I ever messed up with data on an SSD I'd be SoL... Hence numerous backups. :D
 
Emlyn_Dewar said:
I've never tried to recover something from an SSD. Would it not be basically all over for the data, when deleted and TRIM command had been ran? I genuinely don't know, just always assumed if I ever messed up with data on an SSD I'd be SoL... Hence numerous backups. :D
Click to expand...

Yeah if you delete everything, properly TRIM (and format for good measure) short of high end forensics (with some caveats) no one is recovering that.
 
I can recommend a utility bootable USB stick. Have used Hirens boot CD and ultimate boot disk. Both have plenty of apps for all sorts of utility and diagnostic stuff, always handy to have it if something breaks.
 
Gilbert89 said:
Hi all

Looking for some advice.

How would I completely erase a Gen4 NVME SSD prior to sale?

Ideally Free Software.
Click to expand...
A lot of the SSD manufacturers have software that can erase an SSD.

I would also recommend encrypting the data on the SSD before erasing it.

It’s not that it’s likely that an average user can recover data from a drive that’s been erased but there are examples of where people ran a data eraser tool on a drive and advanced software managed to get back some data.

This is just me playing devils advocate because I know about said examples but I wouldn’t be too worried.

I don’t generally sell my old SSDs either, I usually just keep them and erase the data using a tool called hammer.exe.

I execute that repeatedly and recycle the drive.

I have passwords and bank account data on my drives so it would be too risky to sell them (especially how cheap SSDs have become).
 
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