I've read some articles claiming that the secure erase features in SSDs can sometimes be poorly implemented by manufacturers. I'm curious if Samsung Magician's secure erase is effective in making data unrecoverable after a wipe. Does it have a good reputation for this?
5 Answers
Most secure erase processes work by destroying the encryption key, which means the data is meant to be unrecoverable afterwards. There have been cases in the past where manufacturers didn’t implement it correctly, but that's generally less of a concern with newer disks.
I've used Samsung Magician's secure erase feature, and it worked well for me! I think the Samsung team has been refining it for a while, so it's likely implemented properly.
Just a heads up, even if you physically damage the SSD, data might still be recoverable from the chips. For peace of mind, consider using full disk encryption as well as a secure eraser.
I wasn't planning on breaking it, just clarifying how well Samsung Magician handles secure erasure!
But if a secure erase removes the encryption key, what's the recovery method then?
I believe it does work, but honestly, if you're just getting rid of the drive and don't care about data recovery, running several passes with 0's and then 1's is also super effective. That's pretty much as unrecoverable as it gets, unless you want to really destroy it!
SSDs handle data differently due to built-in deduplication, so just writing low entropy data might not guarantee all cells are wiped perfectly.
If you're using NVME drives, check out this open-source NVME management utility. Boot up a Linux distro and you can run format or sanitize commands, which are part of the NVME spec, to securely erase your drive easily.
Same here, I trust it since the software has been around for some time.