Ask HN: How can one safely delete an SSD disk?

I was just taking you literally (delete the disk and not the data) since this is a common pattern in the financial sector. Dell and HP have an optional and more expensive "keep your disk" policy so that you can have companies like Iron Mountain show up, scan the barcodes on the bad disks and shred them on site. You get a certificate (receipt really) that has the serial numbers of the drives you shredded. I was at a company that had this policy for over 50k servers. Not cheap, but totally worth it when you can assure your customers all data is destroyed regardless of encryption methods.

Another reason I listed this option is a response to debates you will see online about data wiping, reserved blocks, spare blocks, vendor low level formatting tools, vendor encryption tools, etc... Physically destroying the disk answers those concerns and may be a viable option for someone if the data they wish to remove could harm themselves or their business if the data is leaked or otherwise mismanaged. If a drive is let's say $1200, but leaking data could cost you a percentage of $120 billion in stock / market cap, then shredding the disk is simple and obvious choice.

On Linux that command overwrites every single (accessible) byte of the SATA device at /dev/sdX (where X is the letter of the drive, e.g X=c) with pseudorandom data.

If you have special compliance needs I'm not sure whether that constitutes "safe deletion" though.

Like I said, no different from any other disk.

The classic Linux shred command will work just fine, same as on any type of disk.

But what you should actually do use use the drive’s built–in instance secure erase feature. This changes the encryption key to a new one, so all existing data is rendered permanently unavailable. Not all drives have disk encryption, but when they do it works the same way whether it’s an SSD or spinning rust. Use hdparm’s --sanitize-crypto-scramble command–line option to do this.

Some drives only have an older feature that does a secure erase that overwrites every block in the device. This is much slower, so use it only if your drive doesn’t support anything better. Use hdparm’s --sanitize-block-erase command–line option.

These options exist for all ATA, SATA, SAS, SCSI, and NVMe drives (though I don’t believe that hdparm knows anything about NVMe, so you probably have to use the nvme command instead).