Samsung Magician Secure Erase

ignatzatsonic said:

Simrick:

I think the TBW on a 250 GB Samsung 850 is 75 TB within the 5 year warranty period.

You are at 288 TB, so its well beyond that figure and I assume any warranty claim you might make would be refused--even though you may be within the 5 year ownership period.

That's quite a lot of writing. What type of use has the drive been subjected to? I ask because I write between 4 and 5 TB per year on my Windows SSD and maybe 8 TB per year on my data SSD.

You should be able to get some sort of estimate of % of life remaining from software--SMART or Samsung Magician I'd assume, although I have no personal experience with Samsung SSDs. My Crucial MX100 is nearly 5 years old and was rated at 89% remaining life as of 6 months ago, though I think that estimate is just about useless. Its TBW is 72 terabytes, but it is well out of the 3 year warranty.

I read that long post of that guy's experience about secure erase and guess he never really came to a satisfying conclusion.

Samsung underrates their SSDs to be on the safe side.
Their old 840 series are capable of over 2.5 petabytes(PB)
Of course the older TLC based NAND cells are also larger than the newer MLC NAND cells...
But my new 860 Pro 2TB is rated 2,400 TBW which is 2 and a half petabytes

ignatzatsonic said:

Simrick:
I think the TBW on a 250 GB Samsung 850 is 75 TB within the 5 year warranty period.
You are at 288 TB, so its well beyond that figure and I assume any warranty claim you might make would be refused--even though you may be within the 5 year ownership period.
That's quite a lot of writing. What type of use has the drive been subjected to? I ask because I write between 4 and 5 TB per year on my Windows SSD and maybe 8 TB per year on my data SSD.
You should be able to get some sort of estimate of % of life remaining from software--SMART or Samsung Magician I'd assume, although I have no personal experience with Samsung SSDs. My Crucial MX100 is nearly 5 years old and was rated at 89% remaining life as of 6 months ago, though I think that estimate is just about useless. Its TBW is 72 terabytes, but it is well out of the 3 year warranty.
I read that long post of that guy's experience about secure erase and guess he never really came to a satisfying conclusion.

Samsung SSD 850 EVO | Samsung V-NAND Consumer SSD | Samsung Semiconductor Global Website



Some go as high as 300TBW. Mine is a MZ-75E250.

I was basically neglectful of this drive....computer on all the time, FF open with 60+ tabs, Chrome with 30, Opera with another 20...I've learnt my lesson.

Yeah, seems that guy who wrote the long article never did come up with any conclusive strategy. I'll tell you what I did: I encrypted the drive with Bitlocker, then ran the Samsung Secure Erase, then put it through the MiniTool recovery program and it was pretty much empty - nothing to be recovered from that thing, so I'm happy with that result.

Crystal Disk Info shows it's in good shape. Hard Disk Sentinel Pro says the status is perfect, weak sectors were not found, TRIM is supported and enabled. But, the health of the drive (Wear Leveling Count in SMART) shows 48% health and 247 days estimated remaining lifetime. Because it dropped from the 60s to 48% in a matter of a couple of days, I decided to pull it out and replace it.

Anibor said:

My understanding is that Trim is supported as long as the USB link supports UASP (USB Attached SCASI Protocol).

Oh interesting.....

jonnied12 said:

True, with the correct adaptors (enclosures). I have two "STARTECH" USB adaptors with SSD's in them and they both support trim.
One adapter is a raid enclosure for two MSATA type drives, the other is a single M2 drive enclosure.
I believe the raid enclosure was around $70.00 and the other was around $40.00.
Just go to the Startech website for more info.
I cannot recommend a better product from my experience with them.

Thanks jonnied12. If you have links to the products, that would be helpful as well, me for and others who read this thread in the future.

I'm going to add one more article here, which I think is important:

Recovering Evidence from SSD Drives in 2014: Understanding TRIM, Garbage Collection and Exclusions | Forensic Focus - Articles

1. Inexpensive laptops often use flash-based storage, calling that an SSD in their marketing ploy. In fact, in most cases it’s just a slow, inexpensive and fairly small flash-based storage having nothing to do with real SSD drives.
2. Ultrabooks and sub-notes have no space to fit a full-size SSD drive. They used to use SSD drives in PCIe form factor (as opposed to M.2 or mSATA) which did not support the SATA protocol. Even if these drives are compatible with the TRIM protocol, Windows does not support TRIM on non-ATA devices. As a result, TRIM is not enabled on these drives.
3. SSD drives are extremely complex devices requiring extremely complex firmware to operate. Many SSD drives were released with buggy firmware effectively disabling the effects of TRIM and garbage collection. If the user has not upgraded their SSD firmware to a working version, the original data may reside on an SSD drive for a long time.
4. The fairly small (and inexpensive) SSD drives used in many entry-level notebooks lack support for DRAT/DZAT. As a result, deleted (and trimmed) data remain accessible for a long time, and can be successfully carved from a promptly captured disk image.
5. On the other end of the spectrum are the very high-end, over-engineered devices. For example, Acer advertises its Aspire S7-392 as having a RAID 0 SSD. According to Acer marketing, “RAID 0 solid state drives are up to 2X faster than conventional SSDs. Access your files and transfer photos and movies quicker than ever!” (http:/www.acer.com/aspires7/en_US/). This looks like over-engineering. As TRIM is not enabled on RAID SSD’s in any version of Windows, this ultra-fast non-conventional storage system may slow down drastically over time (which is exactly why TRIM was invented in the first place). For us, this means that any data deleted from these storage systems could remain there for at least as long as it would have remained on a traditional magnetic disk. Of course, the use of the right chipset (such as Intel H67, Z77, Z87, H87, Z68) accompanied with the correct drivers (the latest RST driver from Intel allegedly works) can in turn enable TRIM back. However, we are yet to see how this works in reality. (http:/www.anandtech.com/show/6477/tr...therboards-too)

simrick said:

Thanks jonnied12. If you have links to the products, that would be helpful as well, me for and others who read this thread in the future.

You bet. The link below shows all USB enclosures they stock, 35 or so across 5 pages of enclosures.
I prefer USB 3.1 specifications over 3.0. Here you go:
External Drive Enclosures | StarTech.com

Note:
simrick posted the following info pertaining to trim on raid drives:
"On the other end of the spectrum are the very high-end, over-engineered devices. For example, Acer advertises its Aspire S7-392 as having a RAID 0 SSD. According to Acer marketing, “RAID 0 solid state drives are up to 2X faster than conventional SSDs. Access your files and transfer photos and movies quicker than ever!” (http:/www.acer.com/aspires7/en_US/). This looks like over-engineering. As TRIM is not enabled on RAID SSD’s in any version of Windows, this ultra-fast non-conventional storage system may slow down drastically over time (which is exactly why TRIM was invented in the first place). For us, this means that any data deleted from these storage systems could remain there for at least as long as it would have remained on a traditional magnetic disk. Of course, the use of the right chipset (such as Intel H67, Z77, Z87, H87, Z68) accompanied with the correct drivers (the latest RST driver from Intel allegedly works) can in turn enable TRIM back. However, we are yet to see how this works in reality. (http:/www.anandtech.com/show/6477/tr...therboards-too)"

My STARTECH Raid enclosure fully supports trim. Running TrimCheck on this Raid0 drive verifies that trim is enabled.