It's generally accepted that SSDs cannot be securely wiped by writing patterns to the drive, due to features such as wear leveling and over-provisioning, and that the most secure way to wipe a modern SSD is using the ATA Secure Erase firmware commands.
However, from my understanding this doesn't seem to apply to NVMe drives because they're not ATA-based - instead, they connect via the PCIe bus. Looking at the Parted Magic tool seems to confirm that NVMe drives have their own equivalent to the ATA Secure Erase command for SATA SSDs:
However, I haven't been able to find an NVMe equivalent for hdparm
. How exactly can I securely erase an NVMe SSD? I'm running Windows, but also have access to a Unix-like environment using Cygwin.