Unable to reset x25-m with HDDErase 3.3?

[provostzakharov]

Has anyone had success using HDDErase 3.3 on an Asus P5B of any flavor? I have the P5B-E and HDDErase hangs at the screen where it should list the various hard drives. I tried with AHCI both on and off.

I just got the 160gb G2, but F-ed up the install of Vista 64 and would like to start with a fresh drive rather than one 30gb closer to the grave... anyone know what's going on?

 

[Old Hippie]

Try the newer version 4.0?

3.3 was only needed for G1.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Interesting, do all SSD's need to be formatted with this tool?

 

[provostzakharov]

Ahhh ok I will try version 4.0 in that case, thanks.

Dorkenstein, my understanding from reading Anandtech's SSD tutorials is that SSDs, due to their mechanics, are designed to write to every data cell on the drive once before deleting any data. Even if you delete a file or even format without special utilities, I think the drive still believes that any cells with data that have been written to are not eligible for new data until the drive is full. Once it's full, they can be utilized but only by copying the whole cell to a cache, wiping the previously deleted data, adding the new data, and then writing the cell back to the drive.

This requires overhead, so the drive is fastest when there are still parts of it that have never been written. When I installed Vista and then deleted the partition and reinstalled it, I believe the drive still has the first installation on it--just in the first 30gb of space. I can only turn back the clock by using this special utility that tells the drive to clear every cell (at least until this TRIM support arrives...)

My explanation is poor, see the article... it's really good.