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I want to securely erase my C: drive, a Toshiba XG5 NVMe 512GB SSD, without wearing it with deletes. I know SSDs can be zeroed directly by resetting the NAND cells, and manufacturers like Samsung have applications to do that. So ideally that is what I want to do, but I can't find one for Toshiba SSDs.

Alternatatively I could rely on TRIM plus overwriting the entries of deleted files in the NTFS MFT. That could serve as a kind of secure delete, and I wouldn't have to reinstall Windows.

Maybe I could try this. (1) Make a Windows RE rescue USB. (2) Install the secure erase software on it (if that is even possible) (3) run it from the USB

Or maybe this. (1) Make a Linux boot USB to boot into Linux on the USB. (2) Use hdparm to do an ATA secure erase.

I haven't done anything like this before. Can anyone advise me?

Is there a utility that will overwrite the entries of deleted files in the NTFS MFT, without also writing all over the disk in a free space wipe as though it was an HDD? And sanitize the NTFS logs & journals too?

Moonling
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2 Answers2

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Rewriting the entire disk is not recommended for an SSD, and is anyway not required, since most modern SSDs have the ability to secure erase the entire disk in one giant TRIM operation.

Toshiba does not furnish such a utility for your disk, so you need to use a third-party solution.

Here is one such free solution:

harrymc
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I succeeded without using a paid-for tool. A TRIM of the drive resets the flash cells of deleted files after a while - it does it in idle processor time. So the only remains is the file metadata in the NTFS Master File Table. There is no application available that will sanitise (in practice by overwriting the entries) the MFT without also writing to all free space on the disk, which I explicitly rule out. So I re-installed Windows. You get a new MFT and can keep your existing files. It took several hours of software installation and tweaking to get it back to the way I like it, but job done. I verified the result by running a quick scan in Recuva then a deep scan. The quick scan looks at the MFT and the deep scan does a low-level read of the whole partition.

Moonling
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