I shut down the system, reconnected the drive to the SATA controller, and found that the drive was bricked - BIOS couldn't recognize it. When I tried it again later on the same drive through a USB adapter, it let me password protect the drive, but would not accept the SECURITY-ERASE command. WARNING: Do not attempt to do this through a USB interface! This procedure worked fine when I tried it on my X-25M through the SATA interface.
![secure erase mac secure erase mac](https://iphonologie.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/secure-erase-free-space-mac-command-line.jpg)
Do not use versions of hdparm prior to 9.31 with such interfaces. Additionally, hdparm versions prior to 9.31 do not pass-through the long command time-outs required for the erase commands to the SCSI-ATA Command Translation ("SAT") layer which such devices use. Such devices may still be unlocked by connecting them directly to a different SATA interface. They may also decide that locked devices are faulty, and hence not provide any access to them in order to issue unlock commands.
![secure erase mac secure erase mac](https://www.ubackup.com/screenshot/en/adv/tools/disk-wipe/disk-wipe.png)
Whilst drives directly attached to a straight-forward SATA controller should work reliably, some "intelligent" interfaces such as USB or firewire to PATA/SATA bridges, SAS controllers or hardware RAID controllers may try to reset devices which they have decided are no longer responding. When a Secure Erase is issued against a SSD drive all its cells will be marked as empty, restoring it to factory default write performance.ĭISCLAIMER: This will erase all your data, and will not be recoverable by even data recovery services.ĭISCLAIMER: If you hit kernel or firmware bugs (which are plenty with not widely-tested features such as ATA Secure Erase) this procedure might render the drive unusable or crash the computer it's running on.ĭISCLAIMER: The security-erase command is a single command which typically takes minutes or hours to complete, whereas most ATA commands take milliseconds, or seconds to complete.
![secure erase mac secure erase mac](https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SecureEraseSierra1280.jpg)
#SECURE ERASE MAC HOW TO#
This procedure describes how to use the hdparm command to issue a Secure Erase ATA instruction to a target storage device.