As detailed here, the hdparm
tool hasn't been actively maintained on Cygwin for some time. This results in a situation in which there is no current tool that can perform the firmware-level Secure Erase and Block Erase ATA commands that instruct a PATA or SATA drive's firmware to erase the drive.
These firmware-level erases are widely considered the most secure and reliable way to wipe modern drives - and on SSDs, the only secure way to do so because features like wear levelling make normal zero-filling unreliable. Essentially, this means that - on Cygwin at least - there is currently no way to securely wipe an SSD.
Amidst this state of affairs, I recently came across the openSeaChest set of utilities, developed at Seagate but open-sourced and designed to work with any SATA, SAS or NVMe drives. openSeaChest seems positioned to be able to replace tools like hdparm
and sg3_utils
, and can be used to run ATA firmware commands like Secure Erase and Block Erase in addition to a lot more.
How do I build the latest version of the suite so that I can use its binaries in Cygwin?