Everything You Need to Know About Erasing Your SSD | How to Safely Wipe Your SSD

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Sherly 

Written by

Tracy King 

Last updated on April 22, 2024

If you have an old hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) that you want to sell, give away, or throw out, make sure you delete all the data on it first. You don't want anyone getting their hands on your personal information or anything else that could come back to haunt you.

Merely selecting a file in Explorer and hitting Delete is not enough: any number of utilities can quickly recover such files.

But if you're looking for a tool that can help you erase all your personal data, we have a solution for you. Here, we'll show you how to securely wipe information from your hard drive or SSD.

Let's get started!

Does Secure Erase damage an SSD?

In most cases, you shouldn't have to do any maintenance on an SSD. Designed to be autonomous, SSDs include a suite of algorithms and safety measures that prolong the life of the drive and ensure that data is deleted correctly.

What is Wear Leveling in an SSD?

A key difference between a regular hard disk drive and an SSD is wear leveling, which is essentially designed to spread data evenly across an SSD's blocks to ensure consistent wear.

A traditional hard-disk drive stores all its files on magnetic platters, with their locations indexed by the operating system, which uses a mechanical arm to access the data. By contrast, an SSD is a flash-memory storage device, similar to a USB thumb drive, but with much greater capacity.

Unlike a hard disk drive, which writes data to specific locations on a physical disk, an SSD writes to a block. And each write wears the memory down a little bit.

While an SSD does report to the host system through the file system where data is stored, it also rearranges that data so that all blocks are worn evenly. Changes to wear leveling are recorded in a separate mapping of file to location.

In other words, an SSD has no physically addressable locations; software cannot address a specific sector on the disk. In other words, your computer has no way of knowing where on the drive the data was copied.

That's wear leveling in a nutshell. Next up, let's talk about the TRIM function of SSDs.

What is SSD Trim?

SSD TRIM is an Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) command that allows an operating system to inform a NAND flash-based solid-state drive (SSD) which data blocks are no longer in use and can be erased. TRIM improves an SSD's write performance and helps prolong its lifespan.

For SATA SSDs, the trim command (not an acronym) is available. SAS SSDs can use the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) UNMAP command. The Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) command set provides a similar DEALLOCATE function for PCIe SSDs.

The TRIM command has been added to the ATA standard by Technical Committee T13 of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS).

How to Safely Erase Information from an HDD/SSD

Are you looking for a way to safely delete information from your hard drive or SSD? If so, then the free partition manager is your solution. It's the best software for erasing or wiping both hard drives and partitions. It allows you to completely remove all data from your hard drive or external storage device, including personal files, programs, viruses, and malware.

The program employs advanced data sanitization techniques that overwrite your data multiple times, ensuring it cannot be recovered using even the most sophisticated tools.

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Take a quick look at the steps to safely wipe an SSD or HDD using a disk erase utility:

We have two options for clearing your data. Please choose the one you need.

Option 1: Erase the partition

1. Right-click the partition you want to wipe and select “Erase.” 2. In the new window, set the time you want to erase the partition for, then click “OK.” 3. Click the “Execute 1 Task” button in the bottom right corner, review your changes, and click “Apply.”

Option 2: Wipe the disk

1. Select your HDD/SSD, then right-click and choose "Erase Disk." 2. Set the number of passes to wipe the data. (You can set it up to 10 times.) Click "OK." 3. Click "Perform 1 Task" and then "Apply."

Note: After you make these changes, you won't be able to undo the disk wipe. Be aware that once you use a free hard drive wiping utility, data recovery software tools won't be able to retrieve the information!

You might also like these extra features in Partition Master:

AOMEI Partition Assistant is a powerful disk management tool. With this free partition software, you can:

• Resize partition to allocate disk space as needed.
• Merge partitions to increase storage capacity.
• Create, format, and delete partitions to free up space for reuse.
• Convert a disk or partition from primary to logical, MBR to GPT, or convert FAT to NTFS (in the Professional edition).

### How is cleaning different from formatting?

If you have ever used a computer, you have probably heard the terms “wipe” and “format.” Though often used interchangeably to refer to the permanent deletion of data from a hard drive, they are not the same. If your organization is recycling computers and there is data on the hard drive that others could access, the difference in meaning can have disastrous consequences.

When it comes to removing data from a hard drive, it's essential to know what these terms mean. So, let's scroll down and see the difference between wiping and formatting data.

Clear data

To make data irrecoverable from a hard drive or other storage device, you must overwrite the space it occupied with new data. Data destruction software is a program that deletes entire disks. It does this by overwriting or wiping every area of the drive with one of several data sanitization methods. Data sanitization techniques essentially insert new random data on top of the original data.

In most cases, a single pass with a disk-wiping application is enough to prevent anyone from recovering meaningful data. But if your company deals in particularly sensitive or valuable information, you may want to run the wipe program two or more times to ensure that the data is gone for good.

• Format data

Formatting a disk is a way of deleting (but not permanently erasing) data. Formatting is similar to deleting files from your hard drive, except that all the files are deleted at once. While the disk may appear empty, the data may be recoverable using data recovery software or the expertise of a data recovery specialist.

Does formatting an SSD shorten its lifespan?

In most cases, formatting an SSD has a minimal impact on its lifespan, unless you're performing specific formatting operations, and it depends on how often you format it. This is because most formatting utilities allow you to perform a full format or a quick format. A quick format only overwrites the partition table and file allocation table without actually deleting anything from the drive.

In contrast, a full format will go through every sector on the disk and “reset” it, which can shorten an SSD's life. However, before a sector fails, an MLC SSD is rated for around 10,000 write cycles.

As long as you don't do it too often, a full format shouldn't significantly affect the lifespan of your drive.

Conclusion

And that's it for today's article. Hopefully, you now know how to securely delete information from your HDD or SSD. Secure Erase is a safe way to erase your SSD or HDD so that the data can't be restored. It's an excellent choice for cleaning your drive and restoring its performance. However, we recommend using a disk management tool to perform the SSD wipe since it lets you securely erase your SSD or HDD with just a few clicks, and also allows you to quickly back up the entire drive before cleaning if necessary.

Frequently Asked Questions on Safely Erasing an SSD with UTF-8 Encoding

Here we also list some more questions about how to securely erase SSD, and if you are interested, follow and find the answers here:

**1. Will wiping an SSD damage it?**

Yes, just like any other type of flash-based storage device, erasing an SSD can cause wear and tear on the drive. Frequent erasing will certainly shorten its lifespan.

When you delete a partition or format the SSD partition, it merely removes the existing partition and data from the disk and marks the space occupied by the deleted data as writable. However, with a reliable data recovery tool, you can efficiently scan and recover the deleted or removed content.

If you use disk cleaning methods like the Diskpart tool with the “Clean all” command or the Wipe Disk feature in a partition master tool, this will erase everything on the SSD and make it unrecoverable.

3. How do I securely erase my SanDisk SSD?

Connect the SanDisk SSD to a Windows computer. Open the drive and back up any important content to another drive beforehand. Go to the Partition Master tool shown at the top of this page, and use its disk wiping feature for assistance.