Drive Eraser 6.2.2 - Release notes

Features/Improvements:

• ALBUS-3265 - S.M.A.R.T. attributes for ATA drives.
  • These attributes are now detected from any ATA drive (HDD, SSD) and reported. They can provide valuable information on the drive state, especially if the drives are old and start failing.
  • Reported in the XML report.
  • Detection for similar attributes from SCSI/SAS drives will come in the next release.
• ALBUS-5204 - Improved Erasure Resume.
  • The feature to resume an interrupted erasure has been improved and includes:
    • Faster resume process.
    • Resuming complex standards ("Blancco SSD Erasure", "NIST Clear/Purge").
    • Better estimations of the resumed erasure progress.
    • Resume if the used image is the same.
    • Simple standards (normal overwriting only) will be resumed from the beginning of the step that was interrupted. Complex standards will be resumed from the very beginning. No extra license is consumed. The final verification will be based on the configured verification.
• ALBUS-5076 - Improved hardware detection.
  • Hardware detection has been improved, especially on machines where the hardware detection used to fail.
  • Concerns System, BIOS and Motherboard information.

Bug fixes:

• ALBUS-2426 - Fix for a problem where the user got a confusing "Not enough licenses" popup in case licenses were not valid anymore.
  • The user will get a clearer popup indicating the validity date of the required licenses.
• ALBUS-2985, ALBUS-4575 - Fix for a problem where the user got a confusing "Network problem or wrong settings" popup in case BDE had established a connection with BMC and the licenses were not available or invalid.
  • Occurred with local and remote licenses. The user will get a clearer popup indicating that there is a problem with the licenses.
• ALBUS-5069 - Fix for a bug where the keyboard test did not work if the keyboard layout was AZERTY (French or Belgian).
• ALBUS-3632 - Fix for a bug where the vendor/chip information of USB NICs was not detected.
• ALBUS-5109 - Fix for a bug where the serial numbers of some Apple machines (e.g. MacBookAir "MD760") were not detected. Fixed via ALBUS-5076.
• ALBUS-4962 - Fix for a bug where the models of some machines (e.g. Lenovo ThinkCentre M70e) were not detected. Fixed via ALBUS-5076.

Known issues:

• ALBUS-5180 - Samsung NVMe MZVKV512HAJH drives cannot be overwritten at all. The issue seems to be tied to the temperature, which quickly rises to the drive limits before the drive deactivates itself. There is no known workaround.
  • Symptoms: erasure fails/become unresponsive after a few minutes.
  • Note: These drives can be found in Lenovo ThinkPad P50 laptops.
• ALBUS-5201 - IBM-XIV SAS ST4000NM0043 drives do not support multiple overwrites. The workaround consists in erasing these drives with one overwrite only (e.g. "HMG Lower") + 100% verification.
  • Symptoms: when using a standard doing multiple overwrites (e.g. "DoD"), the verification fails (few sectors could not be overwritten).
• ALBUS-5342 - Liteon SATA/SSD CV5-8Q256-HP drives cannot be purged. They claim that they support Crypto Erase and Block Erase but both commands fail, probably due to a bad implementation. The workaround consists in using "NIST Clear" with 100% verification.
  • Symptoms: both "Blancco SSD Erasure" and "NIST Purge" standards fail.
  • Note: These drives can be found on HP EliteBook 840 G3 laptops.
• ALBUS-5365 - Apple NVMe "APPLE SSD AP0256J" drives cannot be purged. These drives do not support neither Crypto Erase nor Block Erase. The workaround consists in using "NIST Clear" or "Aperiodic random overwrite" with 100% verification.
  • Symptoms: both "Blancco SSD Erasure" and "NIST Purge" standards are not supported.
    • These drives can be found on MacBookPro 13,1 laptops.
    • These drives may be detected as 2 drives, one having all the capacity while the other has a capacity of 8KB. These are NVMe namespaces, the 8KB namespace does not contain data and erasing it may produce errors.