How to Securely Wipe an SSD or NVMe Drive for Free (ShredOS)

Every recycled laptop or PC that comes through our door has a drive that might still hold someone's personal files, banking info, or business data. Before anything gets resold or recycled, that drive needs to be properly erased — not just deleted, actually gone.

We use ShredOS, a free, open-source tool built exactly for this job. In this post I'll walk through exactly how we set it up and ran it, including the new native SSD/NVMe erase method that just landed in the underlying software this week.

If you don't want to go through this yourself, or you've got a stack of drives to deal with, we handle this as part of our recycling service. feel free to get in touch.

What you need

• A spare USB flash drive (2GB+)
• A PC to write the USB drive
• The drive or machine you want to wipe

Step 1: Download ShredOS

Download the latest release from github.com/PartialVolume/shredos.x86_64/releases. There's a 64-bit and 32-bit version, .img and .iso, almost everything from the last 10+ years is 64-bit, so unless you're working on something genuinely old, grab that one.

We use Ventoy on our own USB stick so we can keep ShredOS next to our other boot tools rather than re-flashing a drive every time. If you're only ever doing this one job, Rufus or Etcher with the .img file works fine too.

Step 2: Boot into it

Plug the USB drive into the machine, power on, and hit the boot menu key (F12 on the Dell OptiPlex we tested on — check yours if it's a different brand). Pick the USB drive.

ShredOS boots fast — we had it at the nwipe screen in well under 10 seconds.

Step 3: Pick your drive and method

Nwipe (the tool ShredOS runs) lists every drive it finds — HDDs, SSDs, and NVMe drives all show up together. Select the one you actually want to wipe and double check it before you continue — there's no second confirmation once you start.

For a normal spinning hard drive, a multi-pass overwrite method works fine. For SSDs and NVMe drives, we now use the native Sanitize / Secure Erase method instead of a plain overwrite — it tells the drive's own firmware to purge itself at the hardware level rather than rewriting every visible block, which is the approach drive manufacturers actually recommend for flash storage.

This is a genuinely new addition to nwipe (merged into the project this same week we were testing), so if you don't see it in your version's menu, grab the latest release.

Step 4: Run it

We ran this on a SATA SSD in our test machine and it completed cleanly — no errors, no drops back to a command line, no manual hdparm commands needed like on older ShredOS versions. Just select it and go.

(We're running this on an NVMe drive next — I'll update this section with real numbers once that's done, since I'd rather tell you what actually happened than guess.)

Step 5: Get your certificate

Once it finishes, nwipe automatically generates a PDF certificate — drive model, serial number, method used, timing, and SMART health data. It saves straight back to your ShredOS USB stick, so there's nothing extra to do to keep a record.

This is the proof we keep on file (and can hand to a customer) that a drive was actually erased before it left the building.

A note on doing this properly

Wiping the drive is half the job, once it's confirmed erased, make sure it goes through a proper e-waste channel rather than the bin. Batteries, boards, and rare-earth components in modern electronics have real handling requirements.