Unable to Secure Erase Phoenix Pro 60GB

[teambeast]

I recently just purchased a G.SKILL Phoenix Pro Series FM-25S2S-60GBP2 less than a week ago. I installed windows 7 64bit and ran some SSD benchmarks to find the SSD not performing up to the advertised speeds and it was not even close.

I then decided to try to do a secure erase hoping it will restore everything to factory settings and get the real performance of this drive.

First I tried to use Gparted using the guide found in this forum. I followed the instructions carefully. Upon entering the command "hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/(my drive)", I get a permission denied which prevented the erase. I even tried to change from AHCI to compatible IDE and vice versa to no avail.

Next, I thought I'd try the HDDErase guide also found on this forum. Set bios to IDE and carefully followed the instructions, only to find out that HDDErase did not recognize any of my drives. I tried using version 3.3 and 4.0 only to have the same results.

Out of desperation, I decided to try the secure erase function using the OCZ toolkit only for it to tell me my drive is frozen and that a power cycle and restart of the program will work. It didn't.

My main machine specs are as follows:

AMD Phenom II X4 970 BE
ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 AM3 AMD 890GX
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
SPARKLE SXX4701280D5-NM GeForce GTX 470
XFX Black Edition P1-750B-CAG9 750W

I also tried secure erasing with my Intel machine:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
ASUS P5K PRO LGA 775
(2x) G.SKILL PI Black 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800

Lastly I've also tried with an older AMD machine. None of these optioned seemed to work for me. Are there any other options as to run a secure erase? All the machines I've used are upgraded to the latest bios and the Phoenix Pro has the latest firmware installed. Do I have a faulty SSD drive or am I doing something wrong? Please help. Thank you!

[MtFuji511]

Hi teambeast,

I pretty much went through the exact same methodology you did and came up with the same results. None of those methods worked and it seemed that was the only option outside of paying for a program to handle this (ie http://www.killdisk.com/; http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipedrive...cXs7QodvSHfGA; http://www.iolo.com/ds/3/?utm_source...FQpZ2godaj8svA and some others) until I came across the SevenForums.com web site.

And what I learned is that you can do all of the secure erasing and disk aligning using a standard Win 7 tool Diskpart. I am running the process right now and it seems to be working.

Here are some links that should help:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...tup.html?ltr=D

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...t-command.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...ent.html?ltr=S

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...tallation.html


Read all of those and that should take care of you. Like I said, I am doing this now so I haven't completely finished the process but I feel pretty confident this will work. I will post any issues I run into.

You can also run Diskpart from within Win7 if you have another system you can access. This is actually what I am doing with the SSD installed in a laptop. No worries if you don't as you can access Diskpart on the Win7 boot CD.

Good luck!

[teambeast]

Thanks very much for the links! I will definitely try this method when I have time later on tonight. Please keep me updated with your results and good luck to you as well

[MtFuji511]

It worked! After the install and basic SSD tweaks (indexing, SSD tweak tool), it's running great! Scored a 7.7 om WEI.

[teambeast]

It worked for me also! Everything seems to be fine so far. Thanks a bunch!