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I have a Samsung SSD 870 EVO and I have enabled hardware encryption by following the instructions written in Samsung Magician, which is to first secure erase the drive and then doing a fresh Windows install.

However, after the steps above, I needed to reinstall Windows again. So I did it and after installing Samsung Magician this time, it showed the "N/A is represented in drive health" error. I rebooted, and the error was fixed.

My question is, should I have secure erased the drive again before reinstalling Windows again?

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    My question is about the technical side of it.
    – Sepp
    Commented Sep 11, 2022 at 17:54
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    To secure erase hardware encryption all you need to do is delete the encryption keys. Anything else seems like unnecessary wear & tear.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Sep 11, 2022 at 18:19
  • Tetsujin: Secure Erase is not like olds-style HDD erase., and does not introduce wear. Secure Erase informs the SSD it should mark all its data as erased, and it does some cleanup that actually make it more efficient afterwards, returning it (mostly) to performance as when new. Or so it was some years ago, reported by anandtech.
    – arberg
    Commented Dec 28, 2023 at 8:36

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No, its not neccessary unless your intention is wipe the system in preparation for resale.

The idea behind secure erase is to keep data safe on the disk. All data stored is encrypted by the SSD using a key (stored on the SSD) that can be locked/unlocked with a password/key which is NOT stored on the SSD. This means that if you want to make the disk unreadable you just overwrite the key on the disk - a very quick operation - rather then try overwrite the data. The importance of this though is that SSD's have hidden blocks which cant be seen by the OS and used to make the drive last longer - thus even if the OS erased the disk it wouldnt erase everything.

Doing a secure erase puts almost no wear on the drive.

The Windows installer would not know the digference between a securely erased disk and one with only the first 4k of data scrambled (most of the partitioning and sometimes booting info is stored here)- and it would not really care, other then options around repartitioning the disk).

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  • Well, I can't see any encryption in effect. My BIOS has no option to set a password for the SSD (ATA password?) and now when I want to disable the encryption or PSID revert, Samsung Magician doesn't allow me to do so.
    – Sepp
    Commented Sep 11, 2022 at 19:42
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I have Samsung drives in my Lenovo laptops. The only hardware encryption I know of on these drives is OPAL2. There is no need to secure erase the drive before reinstalling. I have not done that but I have reinstalled. There are no drive health errors after reinstalling.

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