How to restore your SSD's performance by secure erasing it

NOTE: Make sure you have backed up all your data before doing this as it will completely erase your SSD(s).

You should never do the slow low level format on your SSD as that would wear it out. Instead, you should do a secure erase which is much faster and doesn't wear out the SSD. It simply puts all the SSD cells back into a null state where they are ready to have data written to them.

Please read this article first to understand exactly how this works: What is SSD Secure Erase?

I like to do this before formatting to get that fresh out of the box super snappy feeling and speed on my SSD.

You will need to purchase GParted to do this though.

Note: If your SSDs are in RAID mode, you will need to delete the RAId Array in your BIOS under Intel Rapid Storage Technology then change the BIOS boot mode from RAID to AHCI until you are done with secure erasing your SSDs then you can recreate your RAID Array and change the boot mode to RAID if that's what you were on before.

1) Head to Parted Magic and purchase your license (it's only $11 USD) = https://partedmagic.com/downloads/

2) After you buy your license and get the download link, go ahead and download the Parted Magic ISO and use Rufus to create that ISO onto a bootable USB Flash Disk

3) Boot off the USB Flash disk by restarting your computer and hitting the appropriate button to get the boot options then select the USB flash disk. In my case, on my MSI laptop, it is the F11 key which F11 key which gives me the boot options. Consult with your computer's manufacturer to see which key gives you the boot options during boot up.

4) Once you boot off the USB Flash Disk, you will get a list of options on how you want to proceed, select the first option from the top [Default Settings 64 (Runs from RAM)]

5) Once you're at the Parted Magic desktop, double click Erase Disk, then choose NVMe Secure Erase (as that's what I am attempting to secure erase now) or you can simply choose Secure Erase - ATA Devices right away if you don't have an m.2 SSDs



6) Select all the m.2 SSDs that you want to secure erase then hit " Continue"



7) Check the box corresponding to " I allow this utility to erase the listed device(s)." then hit " Start Erase"



8) You will then see a message confirming that the secure erase was completed.



9) Now let's secure erase the 2.5" SSD. Double Click on the Erase Disk icon again from the desktop but this time choose Secure Erase - ATA Devices

10) I got a warning message that my SSD was "Frozen" so I had to click on the "Sleep" to put my laptop into standby mode, then after a few seconds I clicked on any key to wake it back up and the SSD was not Frozen anymore.





11) Now check the box at the bottom left to allow the secure erase to be done then hit "Start Erase"



12) You will then get a notification that the Secure Erase was done





You can now install Windows again and enjoy the full performance of your SSD or alternatively, restore back a previous Windows image you have created in the past using disk imaging tools like Macrium Reflect. Also see: Macrium Reflect Installation/Usage Guide

 

Will the SSD performance degrade once I restore MR backup? Or should I start fresh? Any changes to drive health?

 

Once you secure ease, your SSD's performance is restored as each an every cell has a fresh state and is ready to be written to just like when you first bought the SSD. Restoring any backed up image will not affect this and you will still get the performance benefit of a securely erased SSD.

 

Ok thanks. Earlier I did Simple Zero Fill and that reduced by drive health to 97%.
Will try Secure erase this Sunday. I found hdparm --secure-erase cmd line. I will try it out.

 

That is a very bad idea! Don't do it again. It will wear out your SSD! Parted Magic is the only tool which can secure erase your SSD properly to restore its performance without killing it.

 

yep, parted magic is definitely the way to go, been using it ever since i got my very first ssd back in 2011

 

I used Partition Wizard WinPE to Zero Fill the drive.

 

Perfect recipe for hurting the lifespan of your SSD.

Make sure you read this article: What is SSD Secure Erase?

The way HDD and SSDs work is completely different. You can't apply the old school methods that we used to do to HDDs on SSDs.

 

@Ultra Male is right, u can do that to regular HDDs before selling them off to protect your data, but for SSDs this is a waste of time and write cycles

 

I've never needed to try it, but for Samsung SSDs, I see Magician offers a "Secure Erase" or something like that. Has anyone tried that? Will that tool also do a SSD reset for drives Magician can work with?

 

Samsung Magician can. But not all ssd brand offer similar software.

 

yes that also works perfectly

 

Thanks!! Just to be clear for other readers, what I meant was using Samsung Magician with Samsung SSDs.

 

Yeah.

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/support/faqs-04/

 

A secure erase definitely brings the performance back to a heavily used SSD. But it isn't a free lunch either.

Just because it isn't indicated in any counter (smart or otherwise), doesn't mean it doesn't harm the drive - specifically the nand cells.

SE is able to bring the nand back to factory defaults quickly. But doing so requires very high voltage levels that damages and degrades the nand each time it is run. Again; no free lunch (ever).

Running Win10's defrag automatically on an SSD on a daily or even weekly basis (basically a 'TRIM' command) followed by a monthly (after Windows Update Tuesdays, ) PerfectDisk run is all that is needed to keep an SSD at optimum performance. After all, we're continuing to use the SSD/system it's installed in right?

To me, taking a drive (and the system it was in) out of commission to perform a destructive (to the nand) 'refresh' doesn't make sense if you're just going to put it back into the system and restore the O/S and user environment to use it again. If the system in question doesn't support TRIM, I might understand doing this maybe once a year - but doing a full defrag with PerfectDisk is something that needs to be done in any case.

A fragmented file is not the biggest performance issue with an SSD - yeah; it causes a few more CPU cycles to track all the fragments... but most SSD's today are fast enough to mask this file degradation for the majority of users. The real issue is free space fragmentation. This is where PerfectDisk is head and shoulders above all competitors. In a single pass, it defragments not just the files, but the free space (and the correspondingly gives us free nand cells that don't need a read/erase/write cycle to write new information to) too.

If a system will continue to be used; a daily/weekly TRIM (via Windows Defrag) along with a monthly defrag with PerfectDisk is a better way to keep the performance at an optimum level with minimum system downtime and the least possible damage to nand cells.

If doing a full reinstall on a new platform, the SE may seem like the way to go then...

But ime, simply running the Format command on each partition and then deleting the partitions while running Windows Setup gives me a much smoother install experience than using a fresh out of the box SSD.

As a matter of fact: with a new drive I prefer to do the install twice: the first one feels like it stutters and sputters - the second one works like I expect an SSD to 'feel' (i.e. 'smooth').

As for Samsung Magician? Yeah, it does have limitations. Like any virus, it is best removed after verifying that the firmware is up-to-date.

And after letting others test that new firmware from Samsung for a few weeks...

 

My ASUS desktop motherboards (Maximus X Hero and Rampage VI Apex) included a secure erase feature like this in the BIOS, and it did speed things up quite a bit. It was the quick version like this, not the slow low level format. You just went into the BIOS, selected the SSD you wanted to secure erase and *BAM* done. Using Macrium Reflect to restore the OS image made it super painless, too. Great post, bro.

Amen to that. Definitely a virus. I don't use Magician malware.

O&O Defrag has a nice optimizing feature especially for SSDs as well as PerfectDisk.

 

@Ultra Male, three things about your post. First and foremost, Parted Magic is a Linux distribution; there should be zero need to pay for it. Parted Magic merely uses the ATA-specified Secure Erase command, which can be performed from any fairly full-featured Linux distro as mentioned earlier. Detailed instructions for Ubuntu, for instance, are here.

I strongly urge you to rewrite your post using a more open-source, widely-used alternative distro like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Manjaro, Antergos or even pure Arch. Parted Magic is a complete rip-off, even at 'only' $11.

Next, the command to take screenshots in Linux is Print Screen (depending on the distro and DE—I'm not sure what Parted Magic uses).

Everyone else, please don't waste $11 just to click through fancy menus instead of typing in commands. This is exactly why companies like Microsoft and Apple can get away with overcharging and filling their products with useless crap.

 

I optimise MFT and do a dirty defrag using Ultra Defrag followed by Contig from sysinternals suite to make files contiguous as possible to prevent frags.
Doesn't EVGA have that SSD erase feature?

It uses hdparm:

Spoiler: hdparm usage

Code:

$ hdparm --security-help

ATA Security Commands:
 Most of these are VERY DANGEROUS and can destroy all of your data!
 Due to bugs in older Linux kernels, use of these commands may even
 trigger kernel segfaults or worse.  EXPERIMENT AT YOUR OWN RISK!

 --security-freeze           Freeze security settings until reset.

 --security-set-pass PASSWD  Lock drive, using password PASSWD:
                                  Use 'NULL' to set empty password.
                                  Drive gets locked if user-passwd is selected.
 --security-prompt-for-password   Prompt user to enter the drive password.

 --security-unlock   PASSWD  Unlock drive.
 --security-disable  PASSWD  Disable drive locking.
 --security-erase    PASSWD  Erase a (locked) drive.
 --security-erase-enhanced PASSWD   Enhanced-erase a (locked) drive.

 The above four commands may optionally be preceded by these options:
 --security-mode  LEVEL      Use LEVEL to select security level:
                                  h   high security (default).
                                  m   maximum security.
 --user-master    WHICH      Use WHICH to choose password type:
                                  u   user-password (default).
                                  m   master-password

I did promise phoenix to try hdparm and see if it sames as parted magic uses or not. I might be compelled to use boot repair ISO. Before that, I will use Macrium reflect to take a backup.

 

Quick point here. If you're defragging without using PefectDisk; you are just wasting nand cycles.

The power of PD is that it defrags free space, in addition to defragmenting files.

I know of no other defragger that does this and does it so effectively (a single pass brings huge improvements to even the most fragmented drive.

See:
https://perfectdiskblog.typepad.com...rive-ssd-support-in-perfectdisk-standard.html

 

You still think PerfectDisk's defragmentation for SSDs at this day and age is worth it? I have a license but haven't used it in a long time.

 

Yeah; PD is still king of the defraggers for a reason (free space defragmenting).

I had built a TP for a client about 20 months ago, which I had forgotten the details about... They brought the notebook back and asked me to look at it. They had a few dozen viruses and a dozen antivirus programs installed...

The system was so slow I actually thought I was working on an HDD. It has an SSD on it (SanDisk Extreme Pro 512GB).

After removing the malware and 11 other 'antivirus' programs, I installed the PD trial, ran Analyze on the drive and saw Drive Performance reported at 36%. Yeah; it felt like an HDD because it ran like one. The file fragmentation was less than 20%; the free space fragmentation was 89%. The drive was around 70% filled with my 'normal' 33% OP'ing...

After doing an online SmartPlacement defrag (with; rarely, boot, occasional, recently and directory sort order), the Drive Performance reported 100% once again and the system felt like an SSD based setup once again.

Even on an SSD as robust as the SanDisk Extreme Pro, with ~33% OP'ing and ~30% free space (around 100GB free) - the system is still brought to its knees when file and free space fragmentation gets out of hand.

PD just isn't an optional install on my systems. It is mandatory.

 

Contig and MS defrag says Free Space consolidation and optimization completed. It takes too much damn time to complete when I run on all disks concurrently. It says Operation completed successfully. The frags are under 10% even after I write 20-30GB of data and SSD performance isn't reduced.

 

@Ultra Male The SSD does feel like new and latency are a tad better and not significant jump in performance. Overall experience is just like I bought a new SSD an hour ago.
I used hdparam in Boot repair ISO and Ubuntu ISO. For erasing NVMe I had to install nvme-cli and everything went smooth. SATA took just 2 seconds to secure erase while NVMe took 10-15 secs for secure erase.

 

If you checked with even a trial version of PD; you would see they're mostly lying.

Like I said above; file fragmentation isn't an issue it once was (SSD's are faster as well as our platforms...).

What slows down an SSD is the read/erase/write cycle needed if the nand isn't 'clean'. That brings even an EVO class x4 PCIe SSD down to current HDD levels (which are very impressive in the latest HDD's, btw.

See:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8

The above is still an excellent article today.

 

Most SSD brands like Samsung, Western Digital aka Sandisk, Kingston, and etc have their own software which you can do secure erase/sanitize for free but only their SSDs. I had to do secure erase on my WD SSD because after i reinstalled windows i noticed slow performance on my SSD when booting up, loading programs and etc. It was annoying to reinstall windows again but it helped to restored my SSD to its former glory, Glad i learned this the hard way.

Also Secure Erase is a good way to destroy all data from a drive so it cant be recovered by any data recovery software out there and it works on HDDs too incase you decide sell or give away your system/drive to someone else.

 

I'm interested in this; how is it different from TRIM or any garbage collection? Are there any concrete numbers to back the statistics? E.g. boot-up times, app startups etc.

In my opinion, these steps aren't at all needed for modern solid state drives. I have a Samsung Pro 850 512gb SATA with well over 20TB of writes and I have never bothered with any sort of format or erase. When I want a 'new' start, I simply enter diskpart>clean. After reinstalling Windows, I just run windows Optimeze Drives etc.

Is it really necessary to 'mark each cell as ready again'? By scanning peoples' posts here, somebody mentioned a BIOS Secure Erase which took a few seconds - that sounds exactly like diskpart>clean and running TRIM...

SSDs defragment files on purpose - the controller knows which cells have been written to and so make sure that the write cycles are evenly distributed.

Having owned a total of now 4 SSDs, I've never run any sort of disk-managing software with any of them. They manage fine. When I'm feeling bored I might just use MS Optimize Drives and it takes only a few seconds. I think nowadays, like 'RAM Optimizers', Hard Drive optimizers are just becoming obsolete. Running any system with default settings is fine for 99.999% of the time.

Is the potential (sceptical) improvement in performance worth the 100gb+ worth of writes needed to restore Windows and programs? The thing is, app and Windows startups only ever READ data from the already-present data in the cells. Only when writing, there is a tiny delay (pico/nanoseconds) needed to erase and re-write the cell. Surely TRIM/ firmware garbage collection manages this? Over-provisioning and leaving some free space should be enough

Honestly, by today's standards I'm surprised we need to do this lol. When I use a piece of technology, I expect it to just work. I shouldn't have to change ANY setting, really.

 

Couldn't agree more.. Secure Erase by the name of it... to just delete data without any possible way to recover those file back... but it is not made for the purpose of restoring SSD performance... I'm sorry to say this but it smells like a snake oil to me..

I let MS Defrag to defrag all my disks & manage all my disks automatically.. and it is now over 3 years and never have any issue with my SSD..and I have benchmarks the day I used my SSD in day 1 and after 1 or 2 years... and I compare them... no difference at all really across all of it (read,write,seq read, seq write,etc...) and I expect to perform like that for many income years

About the link that you posted on the OP... I didn't like this sentence at the end of the page [ This operation could restore SSD to the factory peak performance] ... the word [ could] makes me skip all the hype about restoring SSD performance through Secure Erase..

Also at the same page they link you to another page https://www.disk-partition.com/ssd-management/restore-ssd-performance-4348.html?hot=true in which they mentioned...

" However, garbage collection may not run constantly, and some operating system (OS) may not work well with TRIM command. What’s worse, Windows XP does not even support the TRIM command. If you are using Windows 10/8/7, you do not need to care about this problem."

 

Does this work with a RAID0 set-up or do you need to remove them from the RAID first?

 

No, it does not. The ASUS Rampage VI Apex and Maximus X Hero had a TON of hardware and BIOS features that I haven't seen elsewhere.

 

I had a failing SSD (maybe a SanDisk Ultra). I pulled it, booted another machine, connected failing SSD after machine was booted. Use CmdPrompt, diskpart, list disk, selected failing SSD, clear/clean all (forgot command). Shutdown machine, pulled the failing SSD, rebooted. Here's what seemed to work. I had a USB disk caddy. Upon reboot, plugged-in the USB Caddy, inserted that Ultra II. Went to Disk Manager, selected the SSD located in the caddy, long format (NTFS, ofc). Afterwards the thing was as good as new. Not sure if all steps were necessary, *but Id never had the same success formatting an 'Iffy' SSD without using a disk caddy. For eg, when trying the same thing, as a 2nd disk (new format), but no disk caddy, I could never 'seemingly' repair bad blocks/sectors. Now it passess like 5diff smart tests 100% health (including SanDisk's).

 

@tilleroftheearth Does this look bad? I used trial version of PerfectDisk.

 

This guide is now featured on MajorGeeks: https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/...our_ssd_performance_by_secure_erasing_it.html

 

Is this before, or after a defrag pass? Those screens don't really show me enough information.

But it does give us hints. See the comment about the ~12,500 free space fragments? See the comment about directory fragmentation is high (C: and D: drives, respectively)?

I can't respond further right now, but I will later today.

 

Nice.

 

I didn't do any Disk optimise in PD trial version. I re-ran Contig just now on D: and let me check if PD says anything new! I never formatted the HD, it is like that for 2 years.

 

I agree. The only reason i used secure erase after reformatting on my SSD because i noticed slow performance on a fresh installation of Windows including benchmarks which was strange and after googling about it i found out about secure erase and learning about the differences of SSDs and HDDs. After using secure erase and then reinstalling windows again it restored my WD SSD back to normal performance when i first got it and its been fine ever since, otherwise its just a waste of time. You're going to lose some performance even on SSDs if you have a lot of stuff on the drive and the build up of junk from Windows.

 

@tilleroftheearth

that's an interesting question which I do not know the answer of. Mind explaining why a secure erase is better than your conventional TRIM/Garbage collection to restore back lost performance?

 

Do you want me to post dirty freebie way using terminal and cmd lines to suggest users how to secure erase using hdparm and nvme-secure erase using Ubuntu or any Linux LiveCD?

 

Sure!
Here's a link to AOMEI Partition Assistant dowloadable .exe (I use it as a Portable on others machines, just save to USB -I don't think I had to rename extension/unpack, or tweak it in any way to use as Portable, but I can't recall)
https://www.disk-partition.com/download.html
This should be a working Key. It's got some cool tools... secure erase is one of them. VT shows clean, but please scan before DL (ofc).
AOPR(dash)K7X4P(dash)Z126E(dash)XZZUX

 

AOMEI Partition Assisstant is awesome

Sent from my Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (Oxygen) using Tapatalk

 

I don't think Windows has SSD Secure erase function or API. I always like Minitool PW Free which converted MBR/GPT for free w/o data loss. Its been a long time I tried AOMEI. My first PW SW was from Aomei.
i did Secure erase of SSD using Linux LiveCD so I was thinking of writing a post on how to erase SATA and NVMe SSD using Enhanced Secure Erase.

 

That would be helpful, valuable, for sure!
Using AOMEI one can make a bootable USB and run a command prompt (to clean all), as well as secure erase. Its kinda cool. Peace!

 

Does AOMEI accomplish that through Windows or via USB media?
AFAIK, Windows doesn't support Secure Erase functions in diskpart. Now, they started shipping Surface eraser that has NIST Secure erase and enhanced secure for free to be used on NVMe drives.
I checked their diskpart and powershell docs and didn't find anything.

 

Tonight I might post them, actually obtained all screen snips after trying it on Live Media w/o any backups on Linux! What saved me was HDD/SSD with SED were security locked and data erasing failed. I did have MR backup for OS but not for Data Drive.
@Ultra Male @hmscott @Papusan @jclausius @tilleroftheearth @Dennismungai
Should I make a new thread for secure erasing SSD/HDD using Ubuntu LiveCD or merge them here? The reason why I'm asking this is, hdparm is dangerous in the hands of noobs and budding enthusiasts. They can nuke all drives if used incorrectly!

 

Apparently my Adata software offers it too, and this is the first I ever heard using secure erase for anything other then what its name sake title is. How do I unpartition something? Disk management wont let me do it.

 

Try that AOMEI Partition assistant mentioned a few posts back (w/ Key -still a working key, and there is recently, newer version, 8.0).

 

Either. You can create a bootable USB/media (it's neat b/c it prompts you to install system specific drivers w/in bootable USB). From there you have carte blanche w/ Command Prompt

Spoiler: aomei tools screen

https://imgur.com/k6nyNIQ

 

Very nice.