Samsung Magician Secure Erase Utility cannot find SSD

[o_o]

I have a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD. I created a bootable USB for secure erase using Magician (v4.3). However when I boot up, it cannot find the SSD.

It tells me No supported SSD(s) detected for Secure Erase!!! It then goes to the DOS Prompt, and I have no clue what to do next.

My SSD has the latest version of the firmware, and it is the only SATA device connected to the Motherboard (other than the IDE CD Drive). I think I should mention that I don’t have AHCI, if that helps.

I’d be grateful for any ideas.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

I would suggest using Parted Magic to secure erase instead. It sounds like you have an old motherboard, which may be incompatible with the Samsung utility.

Parted Magic is available by donation, or you can get an older version with the Ultimate Boot CD.

 

[razel]

In the Samsung Magician installation guide PDF, there are some tips for you to follow under the DOS utility limitations. I found it a funny read and almost seems nutty as the person who translated it didn't bother to simply it.

The very 1st line, pretty much limits you to Intel chipsets. Line 2 is:

2) AHCI or ATA mode must be enabled in the BIOS during PC boot up. (So make sure it isn't set to NONE?)

but line 5 is:

5) The DOS Utility will not work with devices attached via SATA 6Gbps (SATA III) operating in IDE mode. (So with SATA III choose ACHI despite line 2)

 

[o_o]

Thank you very much birthdaymonkey and razel.

I think razel ,you may have hit upon the problem I am facing i.e. I am on an AMD system. Let me try this on an Intel System, in a few days. By the way my current setup only supports SATA2 but no AHCI.

Could someone confirm if Secure Erase with Parted Magic is the same as that with what Magician provides you? I have heard that the Secure Erase for HDDs would fill the SSD with 0s, which is bad for an SSD. However the Samsung Secure Erase Utility would TRIM the entire drive and is more appropriate.

 

[Cerb]

Could someone confirm if Secure Erase with Parted Magic is the same as that with what Magician provides you? I have heard that the Secure Erase for HDDs would fill the SSD with 0s, which is bad for an SSD. However the Samsung Secure Erase Utility would TRIM the entire drive and is more appropriate.

Secure erase requests that device do the erasing. How that gets done is the device's business.

 

[o_o]

Secure erase requests that device do the erasing. How that gets done is the device's business.

Thank you Cerb. That's what I was looking for i.e. if this was a standard, and from your response it appears it is.

 

[john3850]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2371753
Post #12
Try using DISKPART CLEAN instead.

 

[o_o]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2371753
Post #12
Try using DISKPART CLEAN instead.

Thank you John. As you realized from the above link, I am doing a Secure Erase so that I can signal to the SSD that some part of the Disk is unused and hence can be used for Overprovisioning. Would DISKPART CLEAN do this instead? Thank you.

 

[Cerb]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2371753
Post #12
Try using DISKPART CLEAN instead.

The OP is trying to effectively keep some unused space TRIMed, permanently, yet also keep using a 2001 OS. Diskpart clean will not do that.

 

[john3850]

Thanks Cerb that saves me the time of trying it.
I was thinking of Diskpart clean all which is no good for SSDs do to the sectors being rewritten to 0.

 

[o_o]

Thank you Cerb & John. Is there anyway to know if the Secure Erase worked?

I am considering booting my machine using a USB of one of the Linux flavors and running hdparm Security Erase, if I cannot get the Magician SSD Utility to work. If the command completes, does not mean it worked?

Thank you again.

 

[john3850]

I wasted a few hours once doing a se I was typing seguio intead of using 0 or “segui0 /c ".

 

[jolancer]

despite all the warnings for hdparm taken directly from the man page quoted bellow. my first assumption would be hdparm was not made for modern SSD's.

to me personally, unless someone explains in greater detail, i fail to see how secure erasing a SSD is relevant at all to your goal... An SSD doesn't allocate the underlying physical data like old HDDs, it rotates the nand data blocks used... So who cares if the nand is erased? they will all eventually have something written to it as rotates the blocks being used... I havn't looked into it but i also suspect there maybe a miss-understanding of free space re provisioning, but thats just my assumption since it sounds like the current theory contradicts how a SSD is saposed to operate underneath the file structure.

also don't quote me on this but, when i looked into it breifly in the past i believe one of the officail sites, i forget if it was the OEM manufacturer or a linux utility page stated that Parted Magic is not the same as the manufacturers utility and may not work for 'any' ssd's

if it were me, personally if the samsung utility didn't work, i would just leave it be... as someone somewere else already stated it most likely wouldn't make any noticable difference in realworld normal usage.

http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm

--trim-sectors
For Solid State Drives (SSDs). EXCEPTIONALLY DANGEROUS. DO NOT USE THIS FLAG!!

ATA Security Feature Set

These switches are
DANGEROUS to experiment with, and might not work with every kernel. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

 

[o_o]

also don't quote me on this but, when i looked into it breifly in the past i believe one of the officail sites, i forget if it was the OEM manufacturer or a linux utility page stated that Parted Magic is not the same as the manufacturers utility and may not work for 'any' ssd's

if it were me, personally if the samsung utility didn't work, i would just leave it be... as someone somewere else already stated it most likely wouldn't make any noticable difference in realworld normal usage.

Thank you for the warning JoLancer. It think I need to get the Samsung SSD Utility to work if what you are saying is correct.

You see, I have an AMD chipset which is rather old. So the Samsung SSD Utility does not detect the SSD when I boot through it. I had two options: either find an Intel Chipset Motherboard, or use an alternative Linux Utility on the current Motherboard/Setup. From your post it seems like I would have to try to find an Intel Motherboard.

On the other hand I thought that the Secure Erase was a standard ATA Command/Instruction, and hence it would not matter which utility was used to issue the command. Cerb alluded to this behavior in Post#5 of this thread.

 

[Cerb]

to me personally, unless someone explains in greater detail, i fail to see how secure erasing a SSD is relevant at all to your goal...

TRIM is unsupported by XP.

An SSD doesn't allocate the underlying physical data like old HDDs, it rotates the nand data blocks used... So who cares if the nand is erased?

The more space the SSD has available, the more optimally it can choose how to move old data, and write new data. Most of us let TRIM do the work. The SSD will have some amount of NAND it can freely erase and re-use, and going from knowing all LBAs are so free, to some subset of them being free, allows it to use as many more pages as that subset not allocated and written to, much as if it had that much more spare area from the factory.

I'd leave it be to begin with, myself, but I'd also leave XP with any new hardware, and wouldn't worry about the SSD performance of a machine that must still run XP for some reason.

 

[razel]

o_o. Give up on the secure erase if you don't plan on selling the SSD. If you just want to install XP, your bigger issue will be that WinXP will not align the partitions that it creates especially on an empty drive. So...

1) Take the SSD out and plug it into another computer running Win7 or up and plug it
either SATA or USB.
2) Issue the diskpart clean command to clear out partition tables and MBR.
3) Create a your partition using 'Disk Manager'
4) Plug it back into the computer you want to install XP
5) Install XP on the partition you want, but DO NOT delete or create new ones. It's ok to format it.

Move on and forget about secure erase.

 

[jolancer]

thx for the attempt, but sorry Cerb, i don't get it. unless NAND ware leveling is dependent on a Trim compatible OS, then i just don't see how secure erasing would be relevant at all. I understand Trim is unsupported by xp. I thought NAND leveling occured independent of the OS and trim assisted the process for the SSD firmware, but NAND leveling occured regardless. Also thought garbage collection was controlled by the firmware OS independent. So i assume ware leveling and garbage collection would work by the firmware regaurdless of the state of the OS or NAND?

If razel's suggestion isn't convienyent for you, i think you could also boot a live linux distro and create a ntfs partition set to 1mb alignment first.

 

[Cerb]

thx for the attempt, but sorry Cerb, i don't get it. unless NAND ware leveling is dependent on a Trim compatible OS, then i just don't see how secure erasing would be relevant at all.

Secure erase to over-provision more than factory, as a proxy for not having TRIM. Without TRIM, having created a full partition before, and used it, the SSD will fill up, and stay that way. It will still be quite fast, if it's a fairly new one, on an aligned partition. But, not as fast as if it had much more free space to work with. Wear-leveling happens regardless, but performance of the SSD can be substantially affected, and write amplification more lightly affected, by having more space to wear over.

So i assume ware leveling and garbage collection would work by the firmware regaurdless of the state of the OS or NAND?

The state of the NAND is what it manages--it is very much in regards to the state of the NAND. A "256GB" SSD, FI, will have 256GB of NAND, and let you have 256GiB, or 238.4GB. As data is written and overwritten (no TRIM), the "missing" 17.6GB is used to evenly wear the flash. It can be written in much smaller increments (pages) than it can be deleted (blocks). So, the controller has to take data that is good, and move it out of blocks that are partially used, with unused data written int them, into other blocks, with no unused data, to free up that block for writing again. Since there are hundreds of pages per block, the more total pages known to be unused by the host, the better, so it has more blocks to choose from, at any given time, both to write to and for moving data. If you have 40GB free, then with TRIM, it can have 57.6GB to work with, rather than just 17.6GB.

High performance SSDs do the same thing from the factory, where you can't mess with it. What makes the Seagate 600 Pro faster than the 600, FI? The extra 115% of spare area it has, over the 600. While I doubt it will make enough difference to worry about, for an old XP box especially, that's basically the OP's goal.

 

[jkauff]

Secure Erase shouldn't be necessary, if I understand what the OP is trying to accomplish. Just run the Performance Optimization utility in Magician, then the Overprovisioning utility. Secure Erase, as someone pointed out, is what you'd do if you were selling the drive and wanted to nuke all personal data.

 

[o_o]

o_o. Give up on the secure erase if you don't plan on selling the SSD. If you just want to install XP, your bigger issue will be that WinXP will not align the partitions that it creates especially on an empty drive. So...

1) Take the SSD out and plug it into another computer running Win7 or up and plug it
either SATA or USB.
2) Issue the diskpart clean command to clear out partition tables and MBR.
3) Create a your partition using 'Disk Manager'
4) Plug it back into the computer you want to install XP
5) Install XP on the partition you want, but DO NOT delete or create new ones. It's ok to format it.

Move on and forget about secure erase.

Thank you guys. I just managed to successfully run the Samsung Secure Erase Utility on a machine at work. So my job is done. (Note to others: you need to have the capability to detach and reattach the SSD SATA Power Cables while you do this. Not the SATA Data Cables, but the Power Cable.)

Thank you razel. Yes, I am aware of the problem Win XP has with disalignment. I always have Win 7 set up the partitions before installing Win XP.

Thank you jkauff. Unfortunately, Samsung Magician does not have Overprovisioninig capability on Win XP. You need Win Vista or later. I think this has got to do with the capability of Vista and later OSes to resize the partitions.

Thanks again guys.

 

[rgallant]

2) Issue the diskpart clean command to clear out partition tables and MBR.

what if he is using a nv gpu has that been fix where after 10 th try you google why is this not working only to find that a different load up is required for nv cards.