geojay wrote:

Hi,

Apologies for forgetting to attach the screenshot... As you can see, the Advanced Tests menu I'm seeing offers different options to those described in the manual and I'm not quite sure which test equates to "Full Erase (SATA)". Is Overwrite Erase the appropriate one?

Thx. You have a different version installed than I have (likely newer).

SCT Write will zero the disk faster - it uses a specialized command that only transfers one sector of data over the SATA interface that is then written multiple times to the disk (called write same in the ATA command set).

Overwrite Erase will zero the disk one sector at a time (exercising the SATA interface more heavily).

I'd go with Overwrite Erase. I am thinking that it won't run to completion anyway (given your symptoms).

There is a third option possible (for some drives), which is to do a cryptographic erase. If a drive supports hardware encryption, then simply changing the encryption key randomizes the disk contents. You wouldn't want to do that one, as it really doesn't exercise the drive at all. It's main benefit is that it instantly ensures the entire drive contents are made unreadable, even if there are bad sectors.

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