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
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
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)
Restart again and run CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 x64
Transfer Speed - 209.4MB/s (Read) / 74.61MB/s (Write)
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
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 BENCHMARK 1.5.3784 x64 after using Secure Erase:
Transfer Speed - 210.1MB/s (Read) / 94.94MB/s (Write)
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:
Here, we can see my SSDs and the status for each is Frozen:
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.
Let's select the drive I want to Secure Erase.
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!).
Press Enter.
Press OK again to restart for complete Secure Erase!
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
Author
Popular Posts
How to adjust your laptop's P-Cores and E-Cores for better performance and battery life
How to Cleanly Uninstall and Reinstall Armoury Crate
How to configure your PC's RGB lighting with Aura Sync
Introducing the ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080: a new frontier of gaming graphics
How to upgrade the SSD and reinstall Windows on your ROG Ally or Ally X
LATEST ARTICLES

The ROG Virtual Assistant gets an AI upgrade with new features
OMNI is getting a big upgrade. Our ROG Virtual Assistant now packs AI-powered features designed to boost your productivity and user experience.

Get ahead of the game with the latest ROG gaming tech from Gamescom 2024
From new X870 motherboards to OLED displays and plenty of mice and keyboards, here’s everything ROG announced at Gamescom 2024.

Buy a GPU and get a free Steam code for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Purchase select GPUs from ASUS, ROG, or TUF Gaming and dive into an epic adventure with a free Steam code for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth!

All the AI tasks your PC is capable of with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU
Your PC is already capable of so many advanced AI tasks, from image and video upscaling, DLSS frame generation, and creative tools from NVIDIA.

ASUS GPU Tweak III: The ultimate tool for advanced GPU tuning
Maximize your GPU's power with GPU Tweak III, ASUS's premier overclocking software — now with more exclusive features.

ROG Makes Wishes Come True With a Charity Auction of a Unique Graphics Card
Sometimes wishes do come true: ROG and Make-A-Wish International teamed up to auction a one-of-a-kind ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card for charity.