I'm running Cygwin on Windows 7 and have done for several years now. I use kou1okada's brilliant fork of apt-cyg
to install packages from the Cygwin repository, and up until now this has suited me fine. However I recently discovered that hdparm
wasn't available at all from the Cywygin repository, and this is confirmed both by running apt-cyg install hdparm
and by using the Cygwin installer.
This is surprising to me considering how popular a tool hdparm
is, and the fact that it is, to my knowledge, the only CLI tool that can be used to trigger the ATA Secure Erase, Enhanced Secure Erase and Block Erase firmware commands on modern hard drives, which are generally considered the safest and most secure methods to wipe modern SSDs.
Confusingly, looking on the Cygwin website seems seems to show the package as existing, but "obsolete" for some unknown reason. Why would such a popular tool be obsolete, and is there any way I can get use it on Cygwin without compiling it from source?
If there isn't a way, are there any alternatives available on Cygwin that can also be used to issue ATA firmware commands to SSDs?
hdparm
compared tofdisk
,smartctl
,df
,du
and the like? All of the latter examples are in the Cygwin repository, usable on my system, and get regular updates.