Secure Erase of SSD
Who knows if is possible to perform a Secure Erase of SSD with Acronis Treu Image 2017. Please your comments.
I think Acronis Drive Cleaner is fine to use on a mechanical HDD. I would not recommend it for an SSD. You can securely erase an SSD by simply deleting the data on SSD and then run a TRIM command on the drive. When you delete data on an SSD the memory cells are set to zeros. Issuing the TRIM command resets the cells to ones which marks the cells as free for writes again. Performing an erase in this manner will limit the amount of writes to the SSD memory cells to the least possible in erasing data and TRIM will reclaim the erased mamory cells which will restore the drives performance to optimum levels.
When you delete data from an SSD and you are using Windows 7 and up Windows itself will issue a TRIM command to the SSD drive controller. The SSD drive controller will reset the drive cells to ones when it determines that drive activity is at a level that will permit doing so without impacting performance to heavily. So once you delete data let your machine idle for a period of time for the TRIM to take effect and run.
ATA Secure Erase is a specific standard to securely erase all the content of an SSD, Manually deleting data, or wiping/overwriting data on a SSD are techniques that are less convenient when you want to blank out an entire SSD, and is quasi instanteneous. There are tools out there to ATA Secure Erase SSD, and some BIOS come with the function built in.
When SSD get frozen, the only way to get out of it is to secure erase them.
Also, some users prefer secure erasing an SSD before restoring an image to "revive" the disk and return it to prime performance.
Acronis doesn't provide ATA secure functionality, but secure wiping/overwriting of existing disk data. This process is more taxing on SSD and can be very long when using more complex alogorithms to ensure security.
Exactly Pat, most of the manufacturers today offer utilities to perform the secure erase of their SSD's using the ATA Secure Erase feature. So this is of course the prefered tool to use in erasing an entire drive.
Many of the most recent SSD's on the market use encryption when writing data to the drives. The keys for this encryption are set and administered by the drive controllers themselves. With these drives a secure erase function is simply a reset of the encryption key by the controller. This causes the drive controller to see the drive cells as marked for writeable space in the same way as a TRIM command and those cells which are set as zeros are then switched to ones indicating they are free to be written to again. That process significantly reduces write count to the cells and refreashes the drive performance as well.
Paul, Pat, thank you both for your input on this question - there is always something new to learn in technology and I haven't needed to erase any SSD's to date so not needed to do this in practice! Information filed away for reference!