Best way to totally wipe a SSD/HD?

Kenshindono

Kenshindono

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Whats the best way to totally wipe a Solid State Drive? I just built a system for my father and finished installing the drivers and everything (was kinda a pain gigabytes drivers required a certain order). Well unfortunatly he went and used it before i had all the virus and security settings installed and seems to have some malware toolbar that i cant get rid of on chrome. Every time i blast it it comes back a day or two later. 'Internet helper 3.1' I can probably get rid of it with enough research and trial and error but i dont really have the time for that. At this point it would just be easier to totally wipe the HD and start again

I just want to know what the best way to totally format/wipe the drive would be. So that im sure the malware isnt still hiding somewhere. Its a SSD. A 128gb samsung 840 evo that i was using just for the OS. I was going to just use the windows 7 install disk to wipe the partition then reinstall windows, but i want to make SURE its totally gone. I heard that doesn't work right sometimes. How can i totally format/wipe it and do a clean install from scratch? Does the format option from the win 7 disk work?

thanks

 
The Samsung ssd should have come with a disk with software on it called the Samsung ssd magician. You can also download it on the web. It has a secure erase option designed specifically for the Samsung ssd. I would use it to erase the drive.
 
hmm dban looks pretty usefull. The only thing about the secure erase thing samsung offers is that i would think that wouldn't be too good for a SSD right? I thin it basically writes the entire drive with junk data. Same thing with Dban, does it just rewrite the whole drive with junk data? Wouldn't that be bad for the SSD?

Im wondering if the regular win 7 boot disk format option would work fine. Do you guys think it would be ok or should i nuke it with Dban or something.  If i do do the win 7 format option, should i delete the partition then format or just format or what?

 
SSDs do have limited number of writes, yes, but a triple wipe on a hard drive is fine for it. These things have a large number of writes (tens of thousands) per each data slot, so one to five isn't going to destroy it. It takes 5 years under normal use based on tests and usually this is a lowball estimate to be on the safe side.

I'm also not sure how data retention works on SSDs unlike HDDs and how recovery of the data works, so I can't say how effective this method is or if it's even necessary.

EDIT: Changed my response after a little research. Reply further down.

 
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Kenshindono said:
hmm dban looks pretty usefull. The only thing about the secure erase thing samsung offers is that i would think that wouldn't be too good for a SSD right? I thin it basically writes the entire drive with junk data. Same thing with Dban, does it just rewrite the whole drive with junk data? Wouldn't that be bad for the SSD?

Im wondering if the regular win 7 boot disk format option would work fine. Do you guys think it would be ok or should i nuke it with Dban or something. If i do do the win 7 format option, should i delete the partition then format or just format or what?
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That's not how the secure erase function of the software works. I don't want to type up all the technical aspects but it is more like a factory restoration it creates a new encryption key and reset the drive to factory default settings so that basically minus all the previous read and writes to the drive it is in a "brand new out of the box state".

Also I do believe due to how DBAN functions it could be harmful to SSDs. It was designed to be used on traditional HDDs not SSDs. You can go with the W7 boot disk format and you should be okay but I would go with the Samsung SSD Magician. Also the magician has other useful features for your Samsung drive that you may want to look into using that you might not currently be using such as OS optimization, firmware updates, over provisioning, and RAPID. If you have any other questions, need the technical aspects explained, or need any more help let me know.

 
Forgot to mention that I had a little time to spare prior to going to work today and did a little digging. I agree with Cloulien. Using something designed for magnetic hard drives (HDD) will not work with NAND flash memory (SSD) or rather I should say that while it will run, it won't do anything useful except eat up your finite amount of writes available. Unfortunately I couldn't come up with a good program to use as I didn't have much time and likely won't look too much further into this at the moment. However I just wanted to throw it out there not to use DBAN or anything designed to overwrite multiple times to every data slot.

 
yea thanks a lot for the info guys. Im gonna probably do the wipe tonight or tomorrow. I think i should be fine with teh windows format option for now. Just wondering should i just straight click the format option on the win 7 boot disk, or should i delete the partition first then format or what? Does that even matter?

 
You can't format a disk without partitiion(s). I suppose you could delete the partitions and re-add them, then format them. My understanding of the way SSD's work, is writing zero's once to the drive should be enough to be really safe.

 
I wouldn't worry about the finite amount of writes that you have on an SSD. Most users would require you to write a 100 GBs of data on it each and every day for 10 years to essentially "kill it"

Obviously you shouldn't attempt to do this unless you truly want to see. It's just an example to show that SSD drives can handle quite a bit of cycles.

 
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