February 4, 2026
Wipe wars: keys vs hammers
Secure erase for Samsung PM951 NVMe drive (2024)
Man tries to wipe old Samsung drive; internet yells: “Encrypt it!” vs “Just smash it”
TLDR: Author learns the hard way that real NVMe wipe commands only work when the drive isn’t behind a USB adapter. Commenters erupted: one side says always use software encryption, another says corporate “wipe” rituals are hollow, and the loudest crowd just says bring a hammer—because your secrets matter.
A simple “wipe my old SSD” turned into a full-blown tech soap opera. In his post, Peter Babič shows how an everyday data delete spiraled from old-school tools to alphabet-soup commands. He tried classic HDD-style wipes, then fancier tricks, only to discover his USB adapter blocked the real magic. Cue reinstalling the chip directly in the laptop so the drive could finally hear the pro-grade “erase” commands. One reader summed it up: “That was way longer than I expected.” Same, e40. Same.
The comments instantly split into camps. The Crypto Crew yelled: encrypt first, erase later. As digiown put it, if you always turn on software encryption (even Microsoft’s BitLocker), you never panic at resale time. Then came the Compliance Crowd, with NegativeK torching the “install Windows + BitLocker twice” corporate ritual as security theater that doesn’t even touch all the hidden bits of the drive. And finally, the Sledgehammer Society crashed in: “Smash it and move on.” Malware fears, trust issues, and a healthy distrust of drive makers’ promises fueled the fire.
Meanwhile, tool nerds cheered on deep cuts like sedutil’s hilariously blunt “—yesIwantToEraseALLmydata,” while others nodded at the plot twist: many USB enclosures won’t pass through the real NVMe erase commands. The vibe? High stakes for your secrets, low trust in the hardware, and zero patience for tech rituals that don’t actually wipe.
Key Points
- •The author attempted to securely erase a Samsung PM961 NVMe SSD after replacing it with a Samsung 980 1TB.
- •Overwrite tools like shred and dd were deemed unsuitable for SSDs; blkdiscard -s failed with “Operation not supported.”
- •ATA secure erase via hdparm was explored but failed because the target device is NVMe, not SATA.
- •NVMe-native methods (nvme-cli), especially nvme format -s2 and potentially nvme sanitize, were identified as appropriate approaches.
- •NVMe commands failed over a USB-to-NVMe adapter but worked when the drive was connected via native PCIe and accessed from live Linux environments.