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To maximize device performance when wiping a drive to use for something else, I use nvme format with --ses=1.

Which in theory should free all of the blocks on the flash.

Really hard to find good documentation on this stuff. Doesn't help that 95% of internet articles just say "overwrite with zeroes" which is useless advice

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What's the difference between this and sanitize? Should we be doing both?

[edit] sanitize runs on the controller level while format works on the namespace level. So I suppose formatting won't touch any pages not allocated to a namespace.

I wish there was _any_ way to find out which NVME controllers supported which operation before you buy them!

Anything that works at the logical block interface will not usefully wipe the device. SES 1 will physically hit every erase block on the device with 20V to blow it away. This happens suspiciously quickly (< 60 seconds typically) but that's just because flash is great.

Doesn't that harm the flash? The OP seems to use this before using it again but such a high voltage seems rather destructive

It consumes one of the erase cycles, of which a device has a few hundred or maybe a few thousand over its lifetime. It's not something you'd want to do frequently.

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