How to ?

[Phage]

Reading about the prices falling on the M4 and the Samsung SSDs, lead me to check the performnace on my ageing Vertex 2e. CrystalDisk shows me that my read speeds are still good but my write are quite poor. I need to do a refresh of the drive (it's still much faster than a HDD) with Secure Erase or similar.

How do I do this without completely re-building Windows, browsers, BF3 etc which are currently on the drive ? The downloading alone would take up most of the weekend.

I have an external drive available, and a laptop, but no other machines.

Ta

[streetster]

So is the question "How do I read everything off my hard-drive and then write back in a contiguous fashion?"?

... I was thinking about saying, just boot up Ubuntu live and then do:

dd /dev/sda /media/ExternalDrive/MyBackup

where /dev/sda is your SSD drive, and /media/ExternalDrive is your external HDD drive...

but then I imagine that will backup the 'image' of the drive, and when you write it back all the files would still be fragmented...

... hmmm but fragmentation shouldn't affect an SSD drive.

What exactly does the wipe achieve?

[Phage]

AFAIK - Completely deleting the blocks and re-installing means less 'fragmentation', more efficient use and faster operations. ie a factory restore.

[Phage]

Found it. Linux tools ugh !

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...?101117-How-to