Secure erase, a function built into every ATA-based drive (hard drives and SSDs) since 2001, erases everything on a drive and marks the cells as empty, restoring any modern SSD to factory-fresh default performance. In fact, due to the total absence of utilities that force complete garbage collection, there’s only one way to return a heavily used SSD to pristine, like-new condition immediately- the ATA secure-erase command. Those operations take place at levels above where true garbage collection occurs in an SSD. Yes, simply deleting files and repartitioning and formatting your drive won’t do the trick as it will with a hard drive. But there are several scenarios where these idle cells can add up to a big hit on your SSD’s performance, such as prolonged use in a non-TRIM environment (like XP), after nearly filling the drive and erasing large amounts of data, or simply repartitioning and reformatting without taking an important step. A modern SSD’s performance shouldn’t degrade noticeably for years if even then. Windows 7 and 8 users really needn’t worry about all this. As such, more “used” NAND cells may be left hanging around on your SSD than you’d suspect, according to nearly every vendor and data-recovery specialist I consulted It may not run constantly, and some older operating systems-notably Windows XP-don’t even support the TRIM command. Not all garbage collection (as the erasing used cells and consolidating data in an SSD’s NAND is known) is created equal.

NAND memory inside an Intel enterprise-class X-25E Extreme SATA SSD.

Samsung magician secure erase