![]() (A firmware problem was probably responsible for this disaster Crucial accepted the drive for return but never told me why the hardware had gone belly-up.) An enhanced secure-erase operation overwrites a drive’s housekeeping data as well as its normal user-data areas, but at least one vendor (Kingston) told me that its normal secure-erase routine does both, too. I’ve never had a problem secure-erasing a hard drive, but about a year ago I did brick a Crucial M500 SSD. ![]() Parted Magic’s DriveErase utility makes it a breeze to perform secure erases on your SSDs and HDDs. You might also need to fiddle with the ATA/IDE/AHCI settings in your BIOS, and in most cases the drive should be mounted internally. By and large it’s a great feature, but using it on older drives has some potential pitfalls, such as buggy implementations, an out-of-date BIOS, or a drive controller that won’t pass along the commands. All invoke the secure-erase (sometimes called quick-erase) functions integrated into nearly every ATA/SATA drive produced since 2001. You can easily erase an entire hard drive or SSD by using any of the free utilities listed below. ![]()
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