Software that supports ATA Secure Erase Command

Posted by vy32 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by vy32
Published on 2012-07-24T22:58:43Z Indexed on 2012/10/03 9:40 UTC
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We have a lot of drives that need to be sanitized. NIST SP 800-88 recommends software that uses the ATA Secure Erase command. That's apparently the only way to be sure that the drive is properly wiped, due to bad-block remapping and such.

I know that this functionality is available in hdparm. The problem with that approach is that it is inconsistent on multiple platforms, occasionally times out, doesn't have error-checking logic, and doesn't check the resulting drive to make sure that it has, in fact, been erased. So a proper program might use hdparm, but hdparm by itself isn't an answer.

I'm looking for open source software that implements ATA Secure Erase. Ideally it will be a bootable disk image like DBAN, but it will use the ATA command.

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