Samsung provides the option to create a bootable USB with a secure erase utility through the Magician software that works great for SATA SSDs but clearly isn’t intended for M.2 drivers as it involves “unplugging” the SSD and plugging it back in. This isn’t something to be doing with M.2 drives since you have to unscrew and reseat it on your board which is a big hastle and risks damage during the process.
My understanding is that the secure erase utility is meant specifically for SSD as it sets all the data blocks to 0s for optimal writing performance [See here for TomsHardware Post I read].
For this reason, I’m afraid to use other bottable drive eraser tools like killdisk or DBAN since they’re designed for Hard Drives and instead do long processes of writing random data several times over. DoD, Navy, Guttman passes and all that. I read this can degrade and isn’t good for SSDs.
So what should I do to secure erase my Samsung M.2 SSD? If I can’t use Magician?
DBAN is not made for SSDs but obviously no matter what the only way to fully wipe it would be to do a lot of writing and rewrite over everything.
What is the process where you set the drive to all zeros? That’s what I wanna do.
What method of secure erase is the samsung bootable utility using? It only takes a few seconds to complete?
If it only takes a few seconds, then it’s just doing a windows quick format. You need a DBAN alternative that’s compatible with SSDs.
From the BIOS menu.
From the BIOS menu.