Warning The instructions below will irretrievably destroy data. Moreover, as the hdparm manpage explains, “these switches are DANGEROUS to experiment with, and might not work with every kernel. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.”
Explanation According to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-88: Guidelines for Media Sanitization, Secure Erase is “An overwrite technology using firmware based process to overwrite a hard drive. Is a drive command defined in the ANSI ATA and SCSI disk drive interface specifications, which runs inside drive hardware....