What to do about Password protected SSD drive?

[idata]

I buy used computer hardware in bulk lots most of it comes from companies that are upgrading or shutting down. I recently came into possession of an Intel X25-V SSD that is password protected. The data on the drive is irrelevant to me and I would just like to do a format/partition and make the drive usable. Is this possible to do myself or would I have to send the drive to Intel? Anyone have any experience with this?

[idata]

Perhaps I will have to send my drive into Intel so they can unlock it and secure erase it for me...

Intel does not support unlocking drives.

Zaq posted a possible solution but it is at your own risk.

[idata]

Is that a fact? It perplexes me how Intel would not support their own drives?

[DSilv11]

It would kind of defeat the purpose of a HDD security lock if the manufacture maintained a default password.

Some one would figure it out & post it on the internet ....

[idata]

There are also liability issues.... can anyone prove that they own the data on the drive?

[idata]

The method I posted above to bypass the hard-drive password comes from the author of HDDerase itself.

This will allow the program to proceed without knowing the password and thus perform a TOTAL secure erase of the SSD(or any hard-drive actually), but will not allow you to see or access the data on the drive. So this method does not defeat the encryption for this purpose.

There is little to no risk to the harddrive itself, rather the risk is to the user itself from messing around with electrical connections if the user is not familiar with the internal workings of a typical PC.

CIAO