I am returning a Samsung 840 SSD to mfg because it consistently fails as a boot drive. However, when I hook it to another computer as a secondary drive, it's completely readable and I need to remove all my personal information. The drive worked fine for about 8 months as the boot drive, but now it consistently fails. It seems that all of the SSD wiping utilities require you to be in IDE mode, but the computer it's connected to is in AHCI and if I try to switch it to IDE, it won't start. Is there another way to wipe the SDD while in AHCI mode?
Very strange. However, one solution is to buy USB HDD rack or anything (SATA-USB adapter is also OK) that allows you to connect SSD via USB port. Then wipe it. Those racks are useful later also, you can get "external HDD" with any HDD.
Thanks for responding. After some fumbling around I was able to get the job done using the Samsung Magician utility. It will help you make a bootable thumb drive from which you can do the actual erasure.
