sanitizing disc

[Nathan Dorfman]

The above is very bad advice. It won't remove your data from the disk,
just some filesystem metadata. Easily available software tools can
resurrect the data you thought you'd deleted afterwards.

If you have a relatively modern SATA drive, there is a SATA command to
tell the drive to securely erase itself. For whatever reason, it is
required that you set a security password first. The commands to do
both are:

sudo hdparm --user-master fakeuser --security-set-pass fakepass /dev/sdx
sudo hdparm --user-master fakeuser --security-erase-ehnanced fakepass /dev/sdx

Replace 'sdx' with the drive you want to erase.

-nd.