(SSD FORMATING) difference between Secure Erase and Sanitize drive, which is more effective at deleting data and factory reseting the SSD?

[Solid State Soul ( SSS )]

So i have a Crucial MX500 SSD that i want to factory reset and delete all data, the most common options for ssd formating are secure erase and sanitize drive, which is better for factory reseting a drive?

 

[GerKNG]

quick format and running TRIM is secure enough that the FBI has trouble to recover data from an SSD.
Data on flash is just a bunch on 0 and 1s without having the related pages.

 

[Calenhad]

Secure erase will clean out the drive, basically orders the controller to overwrite every nand cell once. I would consider that the proper way to "factory reset" a modern ssd.

But it all depends on what you want to achieve. What GerKNG says above is enough, if all you're doing is preparing for a fresh install of your os of choice.

 

[ir_cow]

Some brands even encrypt the data by default so secure wipe really does blank it out. Others just clear the cells and data still can be recovered. If you are concerned about data theft, destroy the drive instead.

 

[R-T-B]

It depends. Technically secure erase on self-encrypted drives (most every SSD today falls in this group) often just deletes the encryption key and generates a new one. Short of a quantum computer, this is as good as a full format. But if you are really worried yeah, its not technically the same.

 

[Solid State Soul ( SSS )]

Appreciate all your feedback, i did some googling and found the following information according to WD :

• Secure Erase will delete all mapping tables on the drive including all data.
• Sanitize will delete all mapping tables and will erase all blocks that have been written.

So in a way, please correct me if I'm wrong, secure erase is like quick format and sanitize is full format?

 

[chrcoluk]

Appreciate all your feedback, i did some googling and found the following information according to WD :

• Secure Erase will delete all mapping tables on the drive including all data.
• Sanitize will delete all mapping tables and will erase all blocks that have been written.

So in a way, please correct me if I'm wrong, secure erase is like quick format and sanitize is full format?

If thats right, thats a change.

It used to be that secure erase zeroed every cell.

 

[:D:D]

There's a post on the Corsair forum that nicely shows how a third party app securely erases by TRIM. Takes about 2 Seconds to complete the whole drive which is about what I have seen in the earlier days of testing TRIM commands. The Corsair toolbox Secure Wipe how ever shows what would be expected if blocks were actually erased.

Parted Magic and Corsair SSD Toolbox

I downloaded Corsair SSD Toolbox. If I do the Secure Wipe, do I still need PartedMagic to re-initialize the SSD? SSD: Neutron GTX 240

forum.corsair.com

It is from a while back so things may have changed. Different drives may do different things, even same drive different firmware.

An interesting article for reference maybe

Life after Trim: Using Factory Access Mode for Imaging SSD Drives

SSD forensics is an ongoing subject. While SSD manufacturers increase storage densities and implement non-trivial methods for wear leveling, caching and write acceleration, forensic experts start using new methods for imaging solid-state media. In this article, we discuss the possibility of using fa

blog.elcomsoft.com

 

[R-T-B]

It used to be that secure erase zeroed every cell.

That was only true on drives that did not use encryption, ie very early SSDs like sandforce controllers and similar.

Technically this translates roughly to two old ATA commands, ATA_SECURITY_SECUREERASE and ATA_SECURITY_ERASE (I may be slightly butchering these). The first will simply wipe the encryption key if the option exists. The second writes 0 to every sector and trims it if applicable. You can still issue both of these commands directly under linux.

 

[Pickles Von Brine]

Just formatting the drive is enough to wipe data but secure erase is good enough most of the time. Generally formatting a drive and running trim is enough to wipe a drive. I never can recover from SSDs that have been trimmed. Its all zeros.

 

[Solid State Soul ( SSS )]

Just formatting the drive is enough to wipe data but secure erase is good enough most of the time. Generally formatting a drive and running trim is enough to wipe a drive. I never can recover from SSDs that have been trimmed. Its all zeros.

How do you run trim, i ran the Crucial storage executive and the only option to format is sanitize, what does trim do different than a secure erase or sanitize format?

 

[AleXXX666]

So i have a Crucial MX500 SSD that i want to factory reset and delete all data, the most common options for ssd formating are secure erase and sanitize drive, which is better for factory reseting a drive?

use some proper SW like Paragon Hard Disk Manager (lol), or O&O SafeErase and use Peter Gutmann algorithm (35x erase). Yes, wear and tear lol, but it's much more warranty that FBI won't recover your tasty strawberry pics and vids compared to all that "secure erase" and other BS.

 

[Pickles Von Brine]

How do you run trim, i ran the Crucial storage executive and the only option to format is sanitize, what does trim do different than a secure erase or sanitize format?

TRIM use to be OS/File system based, now it is just integrated into the SSDs themselves.

 

[A Computer Guy]

How do you run trim, i ran the Crucial storage executive and the only option to format is sanitize, what does trim do different than a secure erase or sanitize format?

If I recall correctly TRIM tells the SSD what data can be erased so you can't necessarily rely on that function itself to destroy data.
Note some UEFI/BIOS have specific utilities for erasing SSD's both SATA and NVMe that may correspond to Secure Erase and Sanitize.

 

[R-T-B]

TRIM use to be OS/File system based, now it is just integrated into the SSDs themselves.

That's garbage collection. Trim still needs OS/filesystem level support.

Simpy running the windows optimize tool on an ssd will trim the drive.

 

[Yodaminium]

To properly secure wipe an SSD/NvME you need a commercial software (AFAIK - last time I checked into it was 3 years ago) otherwise the free ones do not completely wipe the drive.
I work for a financial institution (high security) and they always just destroy the drives because that's the only way to really be sure.
The free ones do not wipe the part of the drive windows cannot see; the commercial ones do wipe that part of the drive that windows cannot see.

Let the naysayers sound off about that comment - giggle.

Edit:

I did not read the whole thread. Trimming is something else entirely; I had to change this, I realized how very badly it was worded. Trimming marks the data/blocks writeable again, until the trim command is actually run the data is recoverable after that nogo.

Edit 2:

You can manually trim the drive but it is usually not necessary as Winblows doessit on a regular basis:

Open an admin powershell terminal or and admin cmd - if you use the admin CMD first type powershell, then the below command: this will immediately trim the drive.

Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter YourDriveLetter -ReTrim -Verbose