How to Secure Erase an SSD using Parted Magic Software

A couple years ago I bought my first set of SSDs, two Mushkin Chronos 120 GB SSDs, and raided them together and so I started my learning curve with how much SSD helps run a PC faster than conventional HDDs. After building my system and everything working great I upgraded hardware and was left with how do I secure erase an SSD for a clean install of Windows to go with my new hardware. I knew that using Windows to do the formatting like in the past was a no no because of the way SSDs work. I know others have their own ways of doing a secure erase on their SSDs and company’s such as Samsung and Kingston are bring their own software to market but I have been using a program called Parted Magic and it hasn’t let me down yet.

What is sanitizing or secure erase an SSD?

Sanitizing or secure erase an SSD is the removal of sensitive data from a system or storage device with the intent that the data can not be reconstructed by any known technique. For data that resides on hard drives and solid state drives (SSD). So basically this is most effective way to erase data on your SSD at the hardware level and not software.

What is Parted Magic?

Parted Magic is an open source partitioning tool. From Parted Magic’s webpage this is exactly what Parted Magic is:

The Parted Magic OS employs core programs of GParted and Parted to handle partitioning tasks with ease, while featuring other useful software (e.g. Partimage, TestDisk, Truecrypt, Clonezilla, G4L, SuperGrubDisk, ddrescue, etc…) and an excellent set of info to benefit the user. Parted Magic is licensed under the GPL, so an extensive collection of file system tools are also included, as Parted Magic supports the following: btrfs, exfat, ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, ntfs, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, and zfs. Parted Magic requires at least a i686 processor and 312MB of RAM to operate or 175MB in “Live” mode.

Head to the next page for step by step on how to secure erase an SSD!