Phill, you can use he programme folder as a semi-portable.

Jazi, that is an old error introduced by the rebranding of the product for this developer it is SUPPOSED to look for "NT version 5.0 Service Pack 4 or later" which is the last release of windows 2000. Some idiot changed the 5.0 version requirement to 5.1 without reducing the Service pack requirement to the respecively correct value of 2 or 3 for XP. The original vendor has got it right, this rebrander has it wrong. It is possible to extract the installer using Innoextractor program, editing the .iss install script back to the correct values and re-compiling the installer and then you can install it under XP SP 2 or 3 or Windows 2000 SP4 again.

Umit, erasure using single or multiple overwrite passes of entire SSD media in consumer grade can and does TRASH SSD drives! It can cause the SSD to fail perminantly irrespective of erase/write cycle life span. It's due thermal and electrical stress literally burning out the chips due to insufficient heat tollerance and inadequate heat dissipation hardware being used in budgeted designs. You can burn out the controller chip or the FLASH memory chips depending on where the weakest point is.

Larz, minimum required for complete erasure of accessible sectors is a single pass overwrite with either pseudo-random or zeros. No criminals, computer shop, data recovery firm or any known nation state would be able to recover any data. On a 1TB hard drive because of the recording technology used there is no need to do multiple passes. So keep drive as cool as possible to maintain optimal write speed and realise it will be slower towards the center of the drive, the first 10% to 20% of the surface will be the fastest portion of the disc. So divide the size 1000,000MB by the average write speed in MB/S and you have an estimate of each pass of writes you choose. Bear in mind that if you have the 1TB drive in a USB caddy on a USB2.0 port you'll be restricted in write speed by the slow USB2.0 port to around 30MB/S. So connect it to the best SATA or SCSI port you have available to get the most out of the drive. If you do not plan to reusue the drive and just want the data gone and the drive never resold or reused just take it apart and throw the platters in a nice hot fire, that'll do it *grins*

I thought USB 2.0 could go up to a few hundred MB/s, not just 30.

subG, a common misunderstanding USB 2.0 high speed is 480Mb/s that is mega bits per second in addition it is what's called a half duplex protocol that means in can either send or receive data but never at the same instant in time, it has to take turns that tends to result in less than direct conversion of bits to bytes due to protocol overheads. Generally in real world terms the best one can get out of mass storage devices in a USB 2.0 port is around 30MB/s that is mega bytes not bits per second. A byte comprises of 8 bits of data. Hope that was not too technical and explains the differences in measurement.

Keith,

Are you handy with a text editor? If the answer is "yes", make a text file with the name Configure.dat and the two line content

[register]
sn=225LX-******WWNZG, ie the key you find in the readme, without leading or trailing blanks

and store it in the programme folder.

Michel Barlier, why?

If you need to erase something forever, you do not think about the lifetime of your SSD. Privacy comes first. Am I right?

Michel Barlier, why do you say that? Their website says: Erase All Devices
Securely and permanently erase data from PC, laptop, HDD/SSD, USB flash drive, memory card, digital camera and other data storage device.
Just trying to understand why you wouldn't use it on SSD. Thanks!

Michel Barlier, why is AweEraser 4.2 absolutely not recommended for SSD?

Celmo, IF you have a SSD drive connected to a data bus that supports TRIM command, which you can verify using TRIMCHECK open source program if TRIM is supported by your SSD configuration. IF it is then since the previous file allocations are de-allocated when a file is deleted or partition deleted the FLASH memory cells occupied by those logical block address is deallocated and queued for electrical erasure, they will not be accessible by the controller for read purposes again until they have been electrically erased and reallocated to a new file or file system structure and data written to them again. Practically TRIM enabled filesystems on any TRIM enabled SSD securely deletes every file in the background upon filesystem deleting it.
Only time I recommend doing at least one complete write and verify of a new SSD device or any FLASH device is to check its a genuine SSD and has good FLASH memory chips installed using H2TESTW because despite the drives controllers using EEC technology they do not always report failed reads to the operating system properly.

If the operating system/filesystem/SSD configuration do not support TRIM command the only options for semi-secure erasure is overwriting files, a single pass is as good as a thousand passes as any write to a SSD sector that had been written to before deallocates the original FLASH memory sector and queues it for erasure and then writes to a freshly allocted previously erased FLASH memory sector. Realise though it is ALWAYS possible for FLASH memory chips to be removed from a SSD and accessed in a Lab' and any non-erased memory cell read and manually pieced together to recreate deleted files queued for erasure. The only garanteed secure erasure method before physical destruction is the Secure Erase ATA command. Everything else is either inadequate (No TRIM supoort no overwrite e.g. SSD in USB caddy), unecesairily damaging (overwrite erasure) or good enough for domestic security needs(Full TRIM support).

Celmo, SSD's are not absolutely erased by overwriting files like they are with magnetic media... please research how FLASH memory devices handle overwriting existing data and maybe it will become clear the downside in terms of FLASH memory device longevity and retrievable residual data if the FLASH memory chips are extracted from the device and examined in a forensic lab' environment.

Celmo, SSD drives do the same job as ordinary HDs but that's where the similarity ends. Data is read and written on to magnetic platters and apart from forcing the drive's mechanical parts to work slightly harder than they normally would it doesn't have any lasting effects on the life of the drive. SSD drives have no moving parts, all data is written to memory blocks, which are made up of billions of transistors (easy answer) and erasing a SSD puts a huge strain on the memory blocks and shortens their life span. Of course there is much more to this as SSDs are a science of their own but I hope this simplified explanation goes towards helping you have your question answered. The method I use to ensure that sensitive data can't be recovered is to encrypt the data, encrypt it again then simply delete it, the SSD will eventually overwrite the space left by the deleted file and even if it was recovered, it would be no use without the decryption keys.

M. H., When files are deleted from the recycle bin, they are not really gone. Those files are still on the hard drive. The first letter is changed by the first # or another character and is no longer accessible. That place is seen by Windows as empty and will be overwritten by a new file. And by cleaning them too regularly by Eraser programs, every disk wears out faster. Thus, the lifespan is shortened by such Eraser programs, especially SSDs.

Michel Barlier,
Computer disk drives are metallic platters than can be written, formatted and rewritten an almost endless number of times.
SSDs are computer CHIPS that are used for storage that deteriorate over time with use. They can be written, erased and rewritten only a limited number of times before they "wear out." The more you write, erase and rewrite SSDs the more you "use them up."
That is why they do not recommend you "use them up" on unnecessary writes.
Hope that helps you understand why unnecessary overwrites are not recommendded for SSDs.

Susan, You have to make sure that everything that has to do with 'My Documents' is on external drives / memory carriers / ssd. Then the ssd where the operating system is located will suffer less from wear and tear.

Michel Barlier, I saw this software as a way to securely delete confidential data and not to use it as everyday delete option...
Besides that, it's kinda myth that "writing" to an SSDs a lot shortens its lifespan:
https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/blog/how-long-do-ssds-really-last

M. H., it is NOT a myth that excessive writting shortens the life of SSD in fact it is worse than most of these articles suggest as in an evolution of FLASH memory when each memory cell contained a single binary bit of information with a single threshold between 1 and 0 that was called SLC single level, the next generation was to MLC which was thought to be the best that could be hoped for and involved trinary bit of data where there are two threshold voltage levels so you can have a value of 0, 1 or 2 per cell which uses Base 3 numbering system and the controller chip converts binary the computer and its data bus uses and trinary the MLC FLASH memory chip uses. Because this requires much more performance from the FLASH memory chips it can tolerate less erase/write cycles than the original SLC chips. Then the next evolution in controllers allowed FLASH chips to have three threshold levels and that permitted storing 4 values in each FLASH cell bit 0, 1, 2 and 3 or base 4 and the controller again handles the conversion from base 2 to base 4... and EEC error correction to attempt to correct for read errors to make the product usable for longer. This increase in data density further reduces FLASH memory tolerance to Erase/write cycles but the greater storage space and wear leveling algorithims permits a usable mass storage device to be made regardless that TLC FLASH memory cells may only have around 5000 to 10000 erase/write cycle tolerance. And in the desire to make bigger cheaper SSD for consumer market QLC or quad level or 4 voltage thresholds per FLASH cell bits. That can encode 5 numbers into a single QLC bit cell 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 and the controller converts the base 2, data into the base 5 levels required by the QLC FLASH memory chip. the problem here is erase/write tolerance has reduced even further to from 500 to 1000 erase/write cycles per FLASH cell. It is made worse by the fact that you cannot erase individual sectors or even write individual sectors as FLASH memory must be accessed in discrete pages when writing or erasing AND erasing page is far larger than the write block size and both are significantly larger than the 512Byte sector size normally used by windows or other consumer operating systems! Wear leveling mitigates this significantly but each overwrite has a quantifiable cost to cheap consumer SSD regardless of dumbed down marketing articles like ontracks one the vast majority of us are going to use consumer grade TLC or QLC SSD devices and NOT the high end server grade SLC SSD that google tested. In addition there is another failure mode NOT mentioned by any of the common articles that is VERY common with consumer grade SSD drives and that is overheating of the FLASH memory chips or controllers if one does extended writes as they are ALL built on a budget expecting consumers to not do continuos writing and over-writing to the SSD. Cheap consumer grade SSD can and do fail if doing multiple passes of writes to the drive, it is not a erase/write tolerance issue but a thermal stress issue and can and does kill legitimate branded consumer grade drives dead! It happened to me a couple of times, once with a USB 3.0 flash drive and once with a TLC based flash device. The first one the controller died and the second one the TLC Flash memory chip failed after second pass of h2tesw and the controller could no longer access it to read or write the chip. Don't believe the hype!

Michel Barlier, actually it's the other way around, windows does many overwrites and writes to the system drive even when the system is idle and the user data writes are a minuscule number in comparison so putting user files onto a secondary drive even if it is another physical SSD card/device seperates the highly stressed system SSD from the less stressed data SSD and makes it much easier to protect the important user data than if it is muddled up with the system drives data.

Tools like SSDREADY can be used to spot the files and folders where the vast majority or writes are occouring and where the efforts could be focussed into either shutting down certain unwanted services or features that are stressing the systems SSD drive/s
http://www.ssdready.com/downloads/

bear in mind the software has not been updated to accept QLC type of FLASH SSD for simple direct estimated life calculation so one has to massage TLC size which reduces accuracy somewhat for life remaining estimate. But it will show where writes are happening on the monitored drives.
TK

TK, I don't see TLC vs QLC vs SLC type SSDs mentioned/compared in the article I've linked.

M. H., which is why it was an obsolete dumbed down article and just an excuse to write how they could be able to recover data from a damaged SSD (since data recovery is their bread and butter) you'd have been better to link to the original google research article... which would still have been irrelevent to consumer grade TLC and QLC SSD drives and thermal stresses of continuos writing like happens with free space overwrite erasing.

Michel Barlier, you are getting a little confused when files are supposedly perminantly deleted by windows the space used by the file is marked as available in the FAT for FAT16/32 type filesystems or MFT for NTFS type filesystems and the first character of the files or directories name in its host directory entry is changed to 0xE5 which is historically the value that low level formatting of floppy disks and pre-IDE hard drives filled new sectors with. So the filesystem treats the entries as if they are blank when they are technically not. The recycle bin is a completely different system altogether! Whilst trying not to get too technical but not dumb it down so much as to make it wrong... when a file is placed into the recycle bin it is given a unique name and the name is removed from the original location and placed in a special folder called $RECYCLE.BIN on NTFS filesystems. A database of all the atributes including original filesystem name and location, create, modify and security attributes of each file placed into the Recycle bin so it can be restored at a later date IF needed. when a file is deleted from the recyle bin the database entry is purged from the recycle bin database file and the unique filename is marked as deleted by changing the first letter to 0xE5 and the space allocated to the file is finally released to the filesystem in a similar manner to when a file is so called deleted perminantly without putting it into the recycle bin.
On Windows 7 and above an additional feature was added to the NTFS filesystem driver where Deletes are handled slightly differently where when a file is to be so called perminantly deleted it send a deallocate event to the mass storage driver which sends TRIM commands to SATA and NVME SSD drives to mark the sectors as no longer in use by any filesystem so can be removed from read access and queued for electrical erasure when complete erase blocks become unused and queued for erasure. SCSI SSD drives have a similar command more logically called Deallocate. The damaging part of the SSD lifecycle is erase/write cycle and the more modern the controller and SSD chip tech the lower the tollerance is to erase/write cycles original SMALL EXPENSIVE SLC SSD could normally tollerate around 100,000 erase write cycles on each erase block worth of memory cells. MLC reduced that significantly but increased the potential storage density so reduced the price per GByte, then TLC was developed and that reduced the tollerance further, and now we have QLC which reduces the tollerance even further but again increased the storage density a bit more making the price per GByte what it is now. This leaves more spare space for an algorithim called wear leveling (use your favorite search engine to learn what that really is and its limitations regarding write page block size vs sector size and erase block size) but there are diminishing returns as well as cost cutting in terms of thermal stress where a SSD is used in heavy write usage like car dash cam or security cameras where they may be non-stop writing to the SSD and inadiquate cooling of the controller and/or SSD memory chips. devices intended for this type of use may be described as high endurance SSD devices. Consumer grade microSD with a 3 or 5 year manufacturers warranty are normally not covered if used in continuos media recording applications like dashcams or DVRs or security cameras because they are only designed for "normal" intermittent write usage.

So called eraser programs are worse than deallocating of TRIM or Deallocate commands because it does wastes an extra erase/write cycle and still does not necesarily release the sectors/clusters/write page block segment for eventual erase and becoming spare for future use. Each unecessary overwrite of a SSD drives sector is a measurable reducer of the ultimate life time of any given SSD technology.