A number of people have started switching to Solid State Disks (SSD) for performance - and boy what a difference to they make to performance. Check out my previous article on the upgrade on my Macbook Pro.

There is however an issue with SSDs - their performance degrades over time. I won’t go in to the technicalities as to why as it’s covered repeatedly elsewhere - there’s a good article on the write degradation on AnandTech’s Website for example.

The way to bring the drive back to native speeds is to perform an erase using the on-board commands for secure-erase - I.e. the routines on the drive controller to support erase. This essentially refreshes the drive to factory-ship state.

There’s various utilities around to carry out this functionality. The most common one is HDDErase by the Center for Magnetic Recording Research.

Current recommendations are to use at least version 3.3 of HDDErase on the current crop of SSDs. The app itself is a DOS based app that must be run from a boot CDROM or floppy disk. This itself seems to present a few people with a problem - a lot of laptops for example are no longer provision with a floppy disk and also people can struggle to produce a bootable CD with the relevant files on it.

So I thought I’d help out. Firstly, the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) v4.1.1, has a version of HDDErase on it - 3.1. You can use something like MagicISO to replace the version of HDDErase on the ISO image with the later version.

Also, you can use MagicISO to create a DOS bootable CD that contains just the HDDErase utility - a quick and dirty solution so to speak.

I’ve done one of these ISO images for you and this can be downloaded here:

Bootable ISO HDDErase 3.3

Burn the above to a CD and then boot from it - the HDDErase utility is on the root and can be started by typing ‘HDDERASE’.

Quick, easy and it just works.

It doesn’t work on a Mac by the way as the BIOS support is not there - you need to run it on a traditional BIOS-based PC. I used my Samsung Netbook and it worked fine.

Now, with anything of this nature, a big disclaimer. 

DISCLAIMER

You use this boot disk and utility entirely at your own risk. There have been reports of HDDErase 3.3 or v4 ‘locking’ SSDs and causing issues. Have a look the CMRR web site detailed earlier and maybe Google your SSD in the first instance to see if anyone else has experienced issues with it.

For what it’s worth, the utility has worked fine on my Corsair SSD units.

Good luck, hope you find it useful.