WARNING: If the SECURITY ERASE fails, use -disable-security to set your drive back to normal. Read this experience and learn from it - Chris) (I've had a similar experience - managed to lock myself out of three drives.
I will update this warning if I find a way to un-brick the drive. I shut down the system, reconnected the drive to the SATA controller, and found that the drive was bricked - BIOS couldn't recognize it.
When I tried it again later on the same drive through a USB adapter, it let me password protect the drive, but would not accept the SECURITY-ERASE command. WARNING: Do not attempt to do this through a USB interface! This procedure worked fine when I tried it on my X-25M through the SATA interface. Do not use versions of hdparm prior to 9.31 with such interfaces. Additionally, hdparm versions prior to 9.31 do not pass-through the long command time-outs required for the erase commands to the SCSI-ATA Command Translation ("SAT") layer which such devices use. Such devices may still be unlocked by connecting them directly to a different SATA interface. They may also decide that locked devices are faulty, and hence not provide any access to them in order to issue unlock commands. Whilst drives directly attached to a straight-forward SATA controller should work reliably, some "intelligent" interfaces such as USB or firewire to PATA/SATA bridges, SAS controllers or hardware RAID controllers may try to reset devices which they have decided are no longer responding. When a Secure Erase is issued against a SSD drive all its cells will be marked as empty, restoring it to factory default write performance.ĭISCLAIMER: This will erase all your data, and will not be recoverable by even data recovery services.ĭISCLAIMER: If you hit kernel or firmware bugs (which are plenty with not widely-tested features such as ATA Secure Erase) this procedure might render the drive unusable or crash the computer it's running on.ĭISCLAIMER: The security-erase command is a single command which typically takes minutes or hours to complete, whereas most ATA commands take milliseconds, or seconds to complete.
Is there an application in existence yet that can secure wipe an external SSD from within a host Windows environment? I wouldn't even mind having to run a VMWare/VirtualBox VM so long as I don't need to actually reboot my host machine into a LiveCD environment but I imagine the VM wouldn't have complete enough control over the SSD to accomplish what is needed.This procedure describes how to use the hdparm command to issue a Secure Erase ATA instruction to a target storage device. I'm well aware of PartedMagic but I do not want to have to burn and then boot up a LiveCD every time I need to secure-wipe an SSD. I know I can't use KillDisk to properly kill the disk due to the algorithm SSDs use to write data. Kingston's "KingstonSSDToolbox" application however does not detect my drive since it's external, so it's useless. Some manufacturers have per-mfg utilities that include an ATA Secure Erase function for their specific brand of drives. I have two Kingston SSDs that I would like to secure-erase, connected to my computer via a SATA->USB interface (I also have the option of using an e-SATA port). How do I secure erase an external SSD without booting into a PartedMagic LiveCD environment? Is there an application that can ATA Secure Erase any SSD from within a running Windows environment yet?