Subclassed: How to securely wipe an NVMe drive
阿新 • • 發佈：2018-12-29
NVMe drives are great: they are fast and they are huge. That huge size, however, can be a pain when it comes to securely erasing data. Old-school commands like
So what do you do when you want to wipe a NVMe drive?
The latest NVMe specification adds other commands, to scrub every nook and cranny (bus caches etc), but as far as I know they have not been implemented yet.
wipe are simply not up to the task; and even if they were, they work on assumptions that do not map properly to a solid-state world. Writing random data over and over is going to dramatically reduce the lifespan of a solid-state drive, and it's pointless when all NVMe disks already have built-in tools that can take care of this task quickly and safely.So what do you do when you want to wipe a NVMe drive?
- Download a recent Linux distribution. I would recommend Debian/Ubuntu or one of their smaller derivatives (like Knoppix). Burn it on a cdrom or USB drive and boot the system from it.
- Make sure your package manager is up-to-date (under Debian/Ubuntu,
sudo apt-get update), then installnvme-cli(sudo apt-get install nvme-cli) - If your drive is a Samsung, it now has to be put to sleep (you can do that with
sudo systemctl suspend) and then woken up. This is a weird bug that Samsung doesn't seem in any hurry to fix. - Now you can securely wipe the disk:
sudo nvme format -s1 /dev/nvme0n1
The latest NVMe specification adds other commands, to scrub every nook and cranny (bus caches etc), but as far as I know they have not been implemented yet.