![]() How to Securely Erase Your SSD via Your Motherboard A paid utility called Parted Magic can do secure wipes for you, but if you don't want to spend money, Windows 10 and 11 have a tool called diskpart which does a good job for free. But your particular drive or motherboard may not have these options available. These tools effectively reset your SSD to a factory state, with even the OP blocks wiped. Some SSD makers provide secure erase utilities for free and some motherboard BIOSes have "secure erase" capability built in. ![]() What you need is a utility that can quickly get at all the visible data. Therefore, it's unlikely someone would be able to get to those blocks using consumer-grade recovery software (a government agency might be able to, however). However, since the over provisioned blocks are out of circulation, they won't be used (or visible to software) again until they've already been overwritten. A full drive overwrite wouldn't touch these blocks, which could have data in them. So there might be 5 or 10 percent of blocks that are unavailable to the OS at any given time. SSDs use overprovisioning to extend the life of the drive and replace any blocks that fail over time. Hard drives need multiple overwrites because magnetic media can leave remnants of data, but all SSDs have a limited number of write cycles so overwriting them multiple times will harm the drive's longevity and may not even wipe the files you want to get rid of. This brute-force overwrite method won't work as well for SSDs. The best way to erase an HDD, which we'll cover in more detail below, is to use a program that writes random data over all the sectors several times so that no remnants of the old files remain. Give this one a try.Securely erasing an SSD is different than doing the same process on a mechanical hard drive. It serves as a great companion tool to be able to monitor the health of your drives, as well as perform other things like diagnostics, optimizations, or even a secure wipe of all your data. If you happen to own and use storage solutions, such as SSDs, made by ADATA, the ADATA SSD ToolBox is a utility that is worth checking out. You can see the full list on the official download web page. When it comes to compatibility, just note that not all models are supported. This is also where you can refer to the Help and User Manual guide, as well as register to ADATA's software and support program. ![]() ![]() Last up, it's System Information wherein you can see some basic information about your PC. Following that, there's System Optimization that helps optimize your drive or your operating system using Standard or Advanced modes. Then, you have the Utilities section that offers options to Secure Erase your drive, check for updates to your firmware of the toolbox itself, and an Export Log feature. Next, you have Diagnostic Scan for conducting either a Quick Scan or a Full Scan to check for errors. The first tab is Drive Information, which shows its health, temperature, and capacity. Up top is the Active Drive section where you can cycle among multiple drives, if you own more than one, using the drop-down menu. It uses a dual-pane layout, with the left side for navigating its five sections and the right serving as its main window. The ADATA ToolBox utility has a clean and modern user interface. ![]()
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