Safest way to wipe clean an ssd.

Amidar · 15 Apr 2010 at 21:53

I'm selling my ssd drive and wondered what the safest way would be to remove my windows 7 installation from the drive.

Thanks.

Fire Wizard · 15 Apr 2010 at 22:19

Your best bet would be to use the Secure Erase command which will completely delete any data on the solid state drive as well as restoring the drive to it's peak performance. You can do this by using a program called HDDErase (Click on the "Download Freeware Secure Erase Utility" link). Download HDDErase and then transfer the program to a bootable USB drive. Before you boot from the USB drive though and subsequently run HDDErase, make sure you set the SATA controller to IDE - Compatible / Legacy mode in the BIOS. Once you have that and booted from the USB stick, type "HDDErase" (Without the quotes) and hit enter. It should be rather self-explanatory from then on in.

If you haven't currently got a USB drive which is bootable, if you follow the instructions from this page here, you should have one in a couple of minutes.

JeffyB · 15 Apr 2010 at 23:09

Exactly what Fire Wizard says, thats how i did mine

DirtyJester · 15 Apr 2010 at 23:50

Fire Wizard said:
Your best bet would be to use the Secure Erase command which will completely delete any data on the solid state drive as well as restoring the drive to it's peak performance. You can do this by using a program called HDDErase (Click on the "Download Freeware Secure Erase Utility" link). Download HDDErase and then transfer the program to a bootable USB drive. Before you boot from the USB drive though and subsequently run HDDErase, make sure you set the SATA controller to IDE - Compatible / Legacy mode in the BIOS. Once you have that and booted from the USB stick, type "HDDErase" (Without the quotes) and hit enter. It should be rather self-explanatory from then on in.

If you haven't currently got a USB drive which is bootable, if you follow the instructions from this page here, you should have one in a couple of minutes.

Cheers for this

Amidar · 16 Apr 2010 at 10:14

Many thanks guys,will give it a go.

deadite66 · 16 Apr 2010 at 10:53

would using that app create a lot of wear on a ssd?

Fire Wizard · 16 Apr 2010 at 12:32

deadite66 said:
would using that app create a lot of wear on a ssd?

It will a little bit, yes. However, providing you don't use the Secure Erase command constantly, it's not going to be an issue. You only need to use the command when you need to completely erase the data on the drive or to restore it to it's peak performance. All though, if you have a drive which supports TRIM and are using Windows 7, using the format command in the Windows 7 setup process will restore it to near enough it's peak performance anyway.

In any case, regardless of weather you would like to delete the data on the drive or restore it to it's peak performance, these aren't things you are going to be doing on a regular basis (I wouldn't have thought anyway

) to be concerned with regards to the degradation side of things.