Reinstalling OS on SSD

WarriorX

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Just a quick question

When reinstalling Windows 7, is the normal format from the OS installer good enough or should I use the secure erase feature from samsung magician to start "fresh".

thanks for the help.
 
Yes should be fine - installed W7 and 10 without problems that way.
 
Guys I don't think he's actually worried about the "secure" aspect of the secure erase. I am thinking he wants to reset the SSD to factory fresh condition.

I say, depends on your SSD and if TRIM was working on your old win7 install. if you are unsure, there's no harm in doing a secure erase, although I've never used the Samsung Magician to do it. I've always used Parted magic. But the last time I did that was before TRIM was standardized and working and I didn't have a Samsung drive. So I never had the opportunity to use secure erase from Magician.

Overall, I say just do it. There's no harm done except wasting half an hour of your time, these secure erase tools run quick on an SSD
 
Thanks for the responses.

The SSD is a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB. Like MikeRotch said, I am not worried about the secure part of the erase, just making sure that it is erased/formatted correctly.
 
Out of interest, how could an SSD not format correctly and what impact would it have?
 
Out of interest, how could an SSD not format correctly and what impact would it have?

No idea. New to SSDs and wanted to make sure I did the reformat with the right tool. So far it seems it don't really matter.
 
If you copy a 1GB File to your Filesystem you create a Filesystem-object thet holds the Information that there is a File with that Size, created on that Date, last accessed on date... and so on, with the Data beginning on Sector xxx ranging to sector yyy. So simplifyed, the actual Data is in the Sectors xxx to yyy. But The Information about that File, its Size and other attributes/Metadata sits on the MFT (Master File Table for the NTFS Filesystem).
Now if you delete that File, the OS tells the Filesystemdriver to forget about the Files Metadata. But it never actually touches the real data in the Sectors xxx-yyy.
Now SSDs have no way of knowing if in their cells in that sectors from xxx-yyy is actual real live data. The OS tells the Driver which tells the SSD via its Trim Command, when a file is deleted, in what sectors that file "resided" so it can free those cells and mark them free. So with a working Trim configuration the SSD knows at any time what sectors are actually used and which sectors are free.
The SSD also has a kind of job schedule to check for those unreleased blocks, to mark them as free. Yet another way, telling your SSD that blocks are really free, is via its secure erase command.
Thats also the reason why it is way faster to delete a File than to create one, because there ist almost nothing written when issuing a delete command.
 
Don't think the format matters much - the real predictor of where your SSD is at in it's lifetime is in the SMART counters. For reference I grabbed the counters off my 840 EVO just now - it's a couple years old and has 4.93TB written shown in Samsung Magician. It was the boot drive and OS drive for my last machine, now sits in an eSATA dock and isn't used much.

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I *think* when Wear Leveling Count gets near the maximum value, you might want to start thinking about replacing an SSD.
 
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