And this is why you always encrypt the drive with software. All of these methods seem to put a lot of faith into the drive controller doing what it claim it does, which you can never be all that sure about. Even Microsoft-backed Bitlocker would help here.

Smash it with a hammer and move on. I'd never buy a used storage device anyway, no telling what malware it might contain.

I had a drawn out conversation with a friend about erasing NVME drives in a way that met compliance needs. The procedure they were given was to install Windows, with Bitlocker, twice with no effort to retain the key.

But that doesn't even overwrite the visible drive space; you can do a simple PoC to demonstrate that Windows won't get to all the mapped blocks. And that still hasn't gotten to the overprovisioned blocks and wear leveling issues that the article references.

You could use the BIOS or whatever CLI tool to tell the drive to chuck its encryption key, but are you sure that tool meets whatever compliance requirements you're beholden to? Are you sure the drive firmware does?

So they went with paying a company to shred the drives. All of them. It's disgustingly wasteful.

Smash it with a hammer.

If you insist on erasing the data, overwrite the entire contents of the drive twice with random data.

Doing it twice will blow away any cached as well (probably).

That was way longer than I expected. Wow.

sedutil-cli —yesIwantToEraseALLmydata $PSID /dev/sda1 or something like that.