Is there some easy way to do a secure erase without entire OS reinstall?

I dont exactly have an extra TB laying around to backup my NVME drive with, and reinstalling everything would take a long time between downloads and setup.

So is there someway to do a secure erase without going through that whole process? Maybe just secure erase a partitioned off section? Defragment?

 

If you have a partition with all the data deleted doing a TRIM resets those data locations to "0" so that the drive can write to them faster.

 

It makes no sense why you'd care to do a secure erase - it's not going to suddenly give you some massive boost in performance over what you're already getting. If this is a hard drive, it's just going to be doing extra work for nothing; moving data around on the drive effectively overwrites whatever was in a given spot/sector previously so that's about as "secure" as you'll need. If it's an SSD, a proper Secure ATA Erase done outside of an installed operating system (meaning it's usually done from a bootable CD/DVD or USB stick with a tool like Parted Magic on it or something similar) and then executing the Secure ATA Erase which takes between 5-25 seconds depending on the capacity of the storage itself.

That of course sends a pulse through every cell on the SSD and returns them to "factory state" with no actual data present on it, but that also means you lose every bit of data stored on it so not a good thing in your case.

But there's no reason to do a secure erase on a hard drive or an SSD in a partial sense; just copy or move data from one place on the drive to another and that overwrites what was previously occupying the sectors or cells, that's it.

The idea of a secure erase for an unused SSD is understandable, but there's no way to do it partially with the actual Secure ATA Erase method - that's the whole drive, every cell start to finish, no exceptions. There are tools that can write zeros to a given partition, of course, but again, it's really a waste of write cycles on an SSD and a waste of time and energy for a hard drive since you can (again) just copy new data to the places you want overwritten.

 

Secure erase is helpful only if you notice worse than advertised SSD performance on general workloads or user specific workloads. Otherwise, it has little to No noticeable benefits( I mean time to install and setup everything).

 

haha

I can assure you I certainly do not get advertised speeds. Something like 45 to 50mbs for q1t1. and usually no more then 2800mbs for sequential read, and I have never done it either to try it out. People say that if you dont get advertised speeds, then the drive is defective, though I am not sure about that.

 

Its an nvme, and I probably wont get a massive noticeable boost. According to the other user comment here, its mainly something you do if you dont get advertised speeds, which most people dont including myself. Usually around 2600 to 2800 sequential read.

 

Which SSD? Sammy EVO?
Here's a guide I wrote for secure erasing SSDs using Linux instead of paying for Parted Magic http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...a-nvme-using-hdparm-nvme-cli-on-linux.827525/

I'd recommend you to do a free space consolidation on the SSD using the guide here
Look at

Code:

defrag /H /U /X C:

cmds for free space consolidator. Once its done, perform a reboot and bench once again. You can skip the defrag part for now. http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-powerdefrag-free-space-consolidation.827436/

 

SE does nothing for read speeds, it affects write speed. You rarely get full speed reading a drive. Usually the speed is based on optimum data size and the data needs to be highly compressible. this is why you should base reviews that use real world file transfers and not synthetics.

SSD's secure erase and trim make great companions for security. HDD's hold data over till rewritten data blocks. making retrieval of unwanted data easy for computer forensics. Now so long as not using OP a secure erase and or trim clears unused data blocks.