Cleaning SSD

cavemanoc · 19 Feb 2012 at 16:29

Sorry - I'm sure it's covered thoroughly, but my search skills have failed.

I'm looking to clean a couple of my SSDs to restore their performance. I have tried Parted Magic as per the thread on the Corsair site, but the programme fails on both machines I have tried. I don't really like the look of HDDerase as I don't want to mess about unplugging drives (It's for my XPS m1730 laptop!)

So....Surely there must be a simple windows based bit of software that lets me wipe a SSD to restore it back to factory speediness?

Orcvader · 19 Feb 2012 at 17:29

Make sure it's on AHCI mode, ensure Windows won't power down the drive and let TRIM do it's magic?

cavemanoc · 19 Feb 2012 at 17:54

That's my plan for my Force 3, but my older Samsung drives don't support Trim unfortunately - Surely it can't be this hard to wipe a drive?

Philtor · 19 Feb 2012 at 22:28

What's wrong with HDD Erase? That will perform a secure erase if Parted Magic won't work for you.

cavemanoc · 20 Feb 2012 at 07:48

Reading through the instructions it says that I have to disconnect any drives not being erased - with my laptop that is a massive faf as I have to take the drive cage out and swap in the drive to be erased - not the end of the world, but a faf none-the-less. That said - does HDD Erase support erasing USB drives? I thought it could only do ones connected directly to Sata 0 and 1?

silversurfer · 20 Feb 2012 at 21:52

That explains why HDD Erase is hanging when I try. I disabled the IDE channel. It just sits there at dos pretending to do something!

Avathar77 · 20 Feb 2012 at 21:56

I have done my M4 128GB with parted magic usb bootable.

cavemanoc · 21 Feb 2012 at 08:43

I thought Parted wasn't compatible with the M4 drives :confused:

Amidar · 21 Feb 2012 at 10:05

cavemanoc said:
I thought Parted wasn't compatible with the M4 drives

I used parted magic on my M4 drive.

cavemanoc · 21 Feb 2012 at 10:46

Glad you guys got it to work - I found the warning Here, which linked to this user's experience Here

Haven't looked into it as I don't have an M4 (will have to wait for the 2nd hand ones to appear nice and cheap

)

silversurfer · 26 Feb 2012 at 16:05

I cant set my SSD to IDE, the motherboard is from 2006 and there is no option for this

Anyway HDDerase cant see the SSD so I'm using Active Killdisk to write zeros to the disk, surely that is ok too ?

cavemanoc · 1 Mar 2012 at 09:42

I'd like to know the answer too - is there more to it than writing zeros or is that enough to refresh the drive?

silversurfer · 1 Mar 2012 at 15:14

I can say it seems to have worked.
Cloned back on windows et all and it is no longer stuttering and timing out like before so I guess zeros does the job