Secure erasing Kingston HyperX SSD

[benwood]

I have a Kingston HyperX 120GB SSD and I'm trying to find a way to secure erase it. I looked on Kingston's web site and couldn't find anything. So I called Kingston and they recommended a program called HDDErase. But I had already found and tried that program and it failed. It hung up when trying to detect my SSD and after I let it run for over 4 hours finally said "P0 is None" which according to HDDErase's Readme file means it couldn't find the SSD. The SSD shows up fine in the BIOS and the data that was on it is still there. My system has a Intel DZ77BH-55K motherboard, Intel 3770k CPU (not overclocked), 8 GB of memory, and 2 optical drives. I also have 2 hard drives but they aren't plugged into power yet.

 

[razel]

Check your BIOS and if it exists, change the disk controller setting that the SSD is connected to, to IDE or compatible mode instead of ACHI. Otherwise you'll need to run Parted Magic. Parted Magic is a Linux image containing several HDD utilities. In it you'll find a secure erase program under System Tools:Erase Disk that has always worked for me. It's actually just a front end GUI that runs a secure erase command line. What I'm getting to is once it runs, you will not have any progress bar and will have to wait for it to complete. Screenshots are here.

Luckily, a real secure erase will give you an estimate from the manufacturer and shouldn't take more than a few minutes. In nearly all times I used it, it took only a few seconds.

Best of luck.

 

[groberts101]

Yep. Parted Magic SE works well on any SSD I've ever used it on.