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I have a Samsung SSD 870 EVO and I have enabled hardware encryption by following the instructions written in Samsung Magician, which is to first secure erase the drive and then doing a fresh Windows install.

However, after the steps above, I needed to reinstall Windows again. So I did it and after installing Samsung Magician this time, it showed the "N/A is represented in drive health" error. I rebooted, and the error was fixed.

My question is, should I have secure erased the drive again before reinstalling Windows again?

Sepp
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2 Answers2

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No, its not neccessary unless your intention is wipe the system in preparation for resale.

The idea behind secure erase is to keep data safe on the disk. All data stored is encrypted by the SSD using a key (stored on the SSD) that can be locked/unlocked with a password/key which is NOT stored on the SSD. This means that if you want to make the disk unreadable you just overwrite the key on the disk - a very quick operation - rather then try overwrite the data. The importance of this though is that SSD's have hidden blocks which cant be seen by the OS and used to make the drive last longer - thus even if the OS erased the disk it wouldnt erase everything.

Doing a secure erase puts almost no wear on the drive.

The Windows installer would not know the digference between a securely erased disk and one with only the first 4k of data scrambled (most of the partitioning and sometimes booting info is stored here)- and it would not really care, other then options around repartitioning the disk).

davidgo
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I have Samsung drives in my Lenovo laptops. The only hardware encryption I know of on these drives is OPAL2. There is no need to secure erase the drive before reinstalling. I have not done that but I have reinstalled. There are no drive health errors after reinstalling.