As you may know securely erasing SSD’s is not the same as
traditional rotating hard drives; largely due to TRIM, reserve cell, and a few other technologies. Thus traditional tools, such as DBAN, will not
work. Many people are using tools made for SSD’s that write “0’s” on all
of the drive. Parted Magic being one of the most talked about.
Beyond that, each drive manufacture makes utility
software for their drive, one of the drive features is to basically shock each
cell on the drive making it blank. The key being, EACH manufacturer.
To make matters worse, some of these are OEM’ed, so the support changes. Microsoft Surface and Lenovo use Samsung drives,
however the Samsung tools do not work, and Samsung offers no support. Same story with Crucial drives.
I found a 3rd party tool called PartedMagic (maker of G-Parted (which is awesome free partitioning software)). It was an inexpensive purchase, it does allow one to save a log file of the drives erased, it does both spinney & non-spinney drives. I have had a few machines not like the Linux boot environment, some of those machines simply didn't like booting off of a 64gb USB drive, but didn't mind a 4gb <shrug>.
Lenovo has a bootable CD/USB image that should work, I haven't tested it yet.
Lenovo SSD erasure page
I found a 3rd party tool called PartedMagic (maker of G-Parted (which is awesome free partitioning software)). It was an inexpensive purchase, it does allow one to save a log file of the drives erased, it does both spinney & non-spinney drives. I have had a few machines not like the Linux boot environment, some of those machines simply didn't like booting off of a 64gb USB drive, but didn't mind a 4gb <shrug>.
Lenovo has a bootable CD/USB image that should work, I haven't tested it yet.
Lenovo SSD erasure page
The HP Folio’s
Mine worked a bit different than what the webpage said,
perhaps it is a BIOS revision thing?
-hit Esc to get to Startup Menu
-F10 BIOS Setup
-tab to get to Security menu
-Hard Drive Tools
-Secure Erase
Micro$oft does have a tool for the Surface. I downloaded it, built
a bootable USB drive, and tried it on a busted one, however I don’t know
what it is doing since the screen is shot, and the external display only works
in Windows.
FWIW there are other Surface Pro specific tools:
Cisco_EAP_Supplicant_Installer_v1.zip
Surface_Data_Eraser_Installer_v3.1.9.msi
Surface_Deployment_Accelerator_v_1.96.0405.msi
Surface_Diagnostic_Toolkit_v1.1.8.0.zip
SurfaceDockUpdaterSetup.msi
SurfaceUEFI_Configurator_v1.0.25.0.msi
SurfaceUefiManagerSetup.msi
