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How to Securely Erase Your SSD with Windows Diskpartīut what if you don't want to pay $15 for Parted Magic and don't have a motherboard or manufacturer software that will securely erase your SSD? A cheap and universal way is to use Windows 10 or 11's built-in diskpart utility at the command prompt. You can shut down Parted Magic (or reboot the computer) as your drive has been securely erased.

We recommend using Rufus, a free USB Flash drive utility, to do the writing. You will use this to create a bootable live disk.Ģ. Buy Parted Magic and Download its ISO file. If you are planning to wipe disks on a regular basis or you want to make sure the OP area is wiped, we definitely recommend Parted Magic, but otherwise, you should consider a free method like using Windows Diskpart, which we describe below.ġ.
#External hard drive recovery no formatting trial
However, the utility starts at $15 and does not have a free trial period. If you don't have a free manufacturer's utility or a motherboard with a secure erase function in the BIOS, Parted Magic, a bootable Linux environment with secure erase utilities built-in, will do it for you. Parted Magic is the best universal secure erase utility around. How to Securely Erase Your SSD with Parted Magic We haven't tested to see if all of these have secure erase features that work with all of their drives. Here's some quick links to manufacturers' software you can try. For example, we had a Kingston Rage Fury M.2 NVMe SSD but found that Kingston's software would only secure erase the company's SATA drives. The method and capabilities vary for each manufacturer's software.
#External hard drive recovery no formatting Pc
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.
#External hard drive recovery no formatting for free
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.
#External hard drive recovery no formatting full
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 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 will harm the drive's longevity and may not even wipe the files you want to get rid of. 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.
