SSD in Frozen State?

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pinoy

Limp Gawd
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Dec 8, 2010
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So I was going to secure erase my Samsung SSD using their software. In the process it said the drive was in a Frozen state. It instructed me to unplug the power to the drive for a few second and plug back in in order to proceed. I got through it fine. Now how do I put the drive back in its Frozen state? I'm assuming this is a safety feature.
 
By "frozen" I assume you mean read-only? SSDs usually do that when the Flash memory is about to die, allowing you the chance to copy data off the drive before it becomes totally unreadable. Have you checked the SMART info on the drive recently? What does it say as far as drive health / life remaining?
 
No it's nothing to do with dying. It's apparently a protection mechanism that prevents a hacker from taking control of the SSD by locking or freezing any modification to it.
 
GotNoRice said:
By "frozen" I assume you mean read-only? SSDs usually do that when the Flash memory is about to die, allowing you the chance to copy data off the drive before it becomes totally unreadable. Have you checked the SMART info on the drive recently? What does it say as far as drive health / life remaining?
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Samsung has a feature that locks the drive purposely called frozen state. So no, none of that stuff. It does it when it’s securely erasing a drive or partitioning etc.
 
Your BIOS may likely be the reason for the frozen state. I believe the reason for unplugging is to disable a command that the bios enabled at boot.

Related:
https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

As said above this frozen state prevents a secure erase from happening which without this protection a virus / attacker could very easily wipe out all of your data almost instantly.
 
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