Sakhtafzar Analyses ASUS Secure Erase - Revive Your Old SSD!

As always, ROG listens to its users and thanks them being loyal to the brand by innovating new inventions. Sometimes by adding some dedicated chips for a special purpose (such as the TPU), or by redesigning the motherboard’s cooling system (such as CrossChill Hydro-cooling), or even making some special features within the awesome BIOS.  ROG always seems to be one step ahead of its competitors and as a result - continuously taking the users by surprise.

I’ve been using ASUS products for a long time, and now after buying a new ROG motherboard and searching in BIOS, I found a new feature made for boosting the performance in old SSDs (over time the performance drops). After looking for more information on the internet, I didn’t find any useful or detailed reviews about this feature. So I decided to test it out for myself and write a review for ROG users, I hope you will find this review useful and maybe try out this really, really awesome ASUS motherboard feature!

About 2 years ago I bought an OCZ Vertex 3 60GB SSD, and it's been in my old PC since that time for general use.

My PC specs:

ASUS Maximus VIII Hero (BIOS 0401)

Intel Core i5 6600K

ROG  Matrix R9 280X Platinum

Plextor M6S 256GB SSD for OS, and OCZ Vertex 3 60GB for testing and review

2 X G.Skill 8GB TridentZ F4-3200CL16-16GTZ

Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1200W

ThermalRight Macho Rev.A Air cooling

ASUS VG236 3D monitor

Benchmarks I used:

HD Tune Pro 5.60

AS SSD Benchmark 1.5.3784

CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 x64

For testing, I connected the SSD to my Maximus VIII Hero and formatted it in the OS, then restarted my PC.

Step 1: Performance before using ASUS Secure Erase

After boot-up the OS and formatting my OCZ SSD, I ran the HD Tune Pro 5.60 benchmark, and you can see the result in below screenshot:

Transfer Speed - 219MB/s (Read)

Access Time - 0.189ms

HD Tune B HD Tune Pro 5.60

Then restarted my PC and ran AS SSD Benchmark 1.5.3784

Transfer Speed - 198.18MB/s (Read) / 73.28MB/s (Write)

Access Time - 0.193ms (Read) / 0.263ms (Write)

AS SSD B AS SSD Benchmark

Restart again and run CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 x64

Transfer Speed - 209.4MB/s (Read) / 74.61MB/s (Write)

 

Crystal B

Step 2: See the difference in performance

After that, I checked the BIOS and formated my OCZ Vertex 3 60GB SSD with SSD Secure Erase. Then I went back into MS Windows to detect my SSD as a new drive, after partitioning it, my SSD was ready to work as a new drive, here are the results from the same benchmarks!

HD Tune Pro 5.60 after using Secure Erase:

Transfer Speed - 307.1MB/s (Read)

Access Time - 0.043ms

HD Tune A

AS SSD BENCHMARK 1.5.3784 after using Secure Erase:

Transfer Speed - 198.48MB/s (Read) / 90.62MB/s (Write)

Access Time - 0.055ms (Read) / 0.256ms (Write)

AS SSD A

AS SSD BENCHMARK 1.5.3784 x64 after using Secure Erase:

Transfer Speed - 210.1MB/s (Read) / 94.94MB/s (Write)

Crystal A

How to use Secure Erase:

The results are marvelous! Now let's go through step-by-step to get your SSDs to work with this incredible feature!

First of all, restart and get into BIOS, in the Tool section go to Secure Erase:

1

Here, we can see my SSDs and the status for each is Frozen:

2

Press the Enter key after selecting my SSD (OCZ Vertex 3 60GB), the system will pop-up a message about erasing all data on this SSD, after that, press OK, another message will appear about the Frozen Status, Click on OK to continue. Finally, the system will restart and go to the last BIOS section.

 

 

The Frozen status has now changed to Ready.

5

Let's select the drive I want to Secure Erase.

6

By selecting my OCZ Vertex 3 60GB SSD, the system will show another confirmation message about erasing everything on the SSD (data can’t be recovered again!).

7

Press Enter.

 8

Press OK again to restart for complete Secure Erase!

9

After the reboot, the process has completed and your SSD is like new again! Simple?!

Analysis of my conclusions:

Over time, the performance for SSDs will not stay the same, read/write speeds slow down and access time for old SSD drives increase. ASUS Secure Erase will rectify that problem by using a special formatting algorithm and you will get your SSD performance back!

Here, I prepared some charts to compare my benchmarks results so you can see clearly the efficiency of Secure Erase:

 

 

Thank you for your time and I hope you can also enjoy using of this amazing feature!

 

Original review source: Sakhtafzar.com