Erasing Drives
There are a variety of methods for erasing the contents of a disk or solid state drive.
Contents
Hdparm
hdparm(8) is a specialized utility for managing ATA hard disk drives. Its erasure functionality will only be available to devices that offer secure erase. To inspect a drive's features, try:
hdparm -I /dev/X
The erasure command is:
hdparm --user-master u --security-erase Eins /dev/X
For more details on the use of hrparm(8) to erase drives, see here.
Dd
The classic UNIX method for erasing a drive is to use dd(1) with a meaningless input; this would often be /dev/urandom or /dev/zero.
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/X
The disadvantage of dd(1) is that it relies on the device's firmware to honestly report the size and location of storage. For a non-malicious example: failed sectors can be remapped and become effectively invisible to userland utilities.