are you wanting to wipe the drive or the empty space?

 

Wipe the drive. There's clutter on it from several earlier installs and it needs a full reset. But not by writing zeros to it.

 

check out dban

Darik’s Boot and Nuke – DBAN

Erase hard drives, desktops, laptops or servers free with a Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) download. Try it now.

dban.org

 

DBAN is a time tested app, however it has not been updated in years.
Parted Magic can do the job Secure Erase - Powerful, easy to use, and inexpensive.

 

DBAN is a time tested app, however it has not been updated in years.
Parted Magic can do the job Secure Erase - Powerful, easy to use, and inexpensive.

Yea, it has not been updated since 2015 but secure wiping a drive not change either

 

sobeit: I'd be very surprised if DBAN uses voltage spike functionality to reset all NVME memory cells to empty. All other methods, AFAIK, wipe by writing zeros to the drive.
spunk.funk: Thanks. My question was whether Parted Magic would work, as a third party app, on my Hynix NVME. I'll take your advice, cheers

 

I should have sent you this link for one of the tabs in the previous link NVMe Secure Erase - Powerful, easy to use, and inexpensive.

 

Thanks, man. There's not yet a lot of info about using the system.

 

It's an SSD, so it supports TRIM. All you need to do is to quick format it, as you would normally do during an OS install. The OS then issues a TRIM command which tells the SSD that all empty space can be erased at it own convenience. When reading empty space that has been TRIM-ed but not yet erased, the SSD can either return zeros, or it can return the original data, or it can return undefined gibberish. That depends on the design of the firmware.

You can examine the sectors using a disc editor, eg DMDE freeware. If you see zeros, then you are done.

Some SSDs have built-in hardware encryption. These can be instantaneously cryptoerased. The actual flash memory cells are not erased, and the data is not touched. Instead the old encryption key is simply discarded and replaced with a new one. This renders the data unintelligible.

 

fzabkar, thanks for your comments.
Unfortunately, I ran into a major glitch - the 512 Hynix NVME system drive couldn't be seen. I'd created a Parted Magic boot USB but when it finished loading, there was no sign of the NVME.
I also have an Apacer 250G conventional SSD mounted in the laptop and it was clearly visible. Wiping that with 'ATA Secure Erase' was easy and fast.
But not the NVME.
In the finish I booted with a W10 installation USB, did the 'Shift\F10' method to bring up the command prompt (which actually had to be Shift\FN\F10) and used diskpart\clean all. That worked.
So the NVME is now empty and, presumably, zeroed to a standstill..
So, Secure Erase by 'voltage spike'? Maybe it's an urban myth, lol.