A physical erase involves zapping the drive’s magnetic particles or NAND cells back to their default state. Without the original keys, the data is useless. If a drive is encrypted-and some are by nature-a secure-erase operation simply deletes the encryption keys, and then regenerates them. In the bad old days, running a secure-erase on some SSDs sometimes left data behind.ĭepending on the controller you use (notably SandForce), a secure-erase can be cryptographic or physical. (A firmware problem was probably responsible for this disaster Crucial accepted the drive for return but never told me why the hardware had gone belly-up.) An enhanced secure-erase operation overwrites a drive’s housekeeping data as well as its normal user-data areas, but at least one vendor (Kingston) told me that its normal secure-erase routine does both, too. I’ve never had a problem secure-erasing a hard drive, but about a year ago I did brick a Crucial M500 SSD.

Parted Magic’s DriveErase utility makes it a breeze to perform secure erases on your SSDs and HDDs.

You might also need to fiddle with the ATA/IDE/AHCI settings in your BIOS, and in most cases the drive should be mounted internally. By and large it’s a great feature, but using it on older drives has some potential pitfalls, such as buggy implementations, an out-of-date BIOS, or a drive controller that won’t pass along the commands. All invoke the secure-erase (sometimes called quick-erase) functions integrated into nearly every ATA/SATA drive produced since 2001. You can easily erase an entire hard drive or SSD by using any of the free utilities listed below.

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