I have a few m.2 SATA Samsung drives that I needed to securely erase. It’s a tricky thing to do, surprisingly, especially when you’d prefer to not do a long pass in the manner that you would with hard drives.
For those unaware, Samsung has a built-in tool with the Magician software to create a USB boot disk to securely erase an SSD. With a 2.5” drive, where the SATA and power are separate, dealing with a “frozen” drive involves starting the utility, selecting the drive, unplugging the power lead from the drive, powering it again, and then proceeding with the quick, secure erase.
When the drive has an edge connector like an m.2 slot, this isn’t possible. In the course of trying to replicate this process I tried many things, including other computers. None of this effort was successful, however, and I needed a hybrid approach.
It occurred to me that someone must make an adapter that would make it possible to connect an m.2 SATA drive to a standard SATA port. There are reasons for doing this, though I’d have a hard time coming up with many, but I’m glad that such a thing exists. It’s cheap, and worth having around for not only tasks like this, but as a neat tool to keep on the shelf just in case.
A brand called ELUTENG makes this:
It’s SATA III and can adapt to all four of the m.2 module lengths, from 30- to 80-mm. The drive slides right in and the included hardware and screwdriver can fix a drive in place if wanted.
So, I picked one up, and it does the trick just fine, making an m.2 into a 2.5″ analogue and letting me securely erase these drives using the Samsung utility. It’s brutally utilitarian, and that’s exactly what the task needed. It might also be useful for use in an SATA-only system at some point, and with m.2 SATA ports being a little more unusual, that might be a thing in the future.
For those curious, this was using an older NUC, where I was able to disconnect the power from the motherboard using the cable connector below:
For the full details and part number for this item, which I did not receive for free, see below
