Chapter 2. Disk Drive Concepts

Abstract

In order to make best use of this tool, you need to understand some of the concepts behind disk drives, and securely erasing disks. This chapter will explain the basics, and it will also show you how to get help when you're using the GUI. You can safely skip this chapter if you already understand the concepts, because I've gone into fairly basic detail here.

Table of Contents

Device Names
"Disk"
HDD
SSD
ATA
SATA
NVME
Hexadecimal numbers
ATA/SATA Secure Erase Command
NVME Secure Erase Command
"Secure Erase" vs "Enhanced Secure Erase"
NIST 800-88

Device Names

Device names are a bit of a weird concept to a lot of people, particularly those who use Windows, where drive letters are used instead, like C:, D: and so on. On Linux, however, devices (like hard drives, USB drives, DVD drives) have names. These names are used to access the drives, so for example, to read directly from the DVD drive, you might read from a device called "/dev/sr0", which you can think of as being similar to the D: drive in Windows.

Linux tends to use different names for devices. It's quite common to have names like "/dev/sda" (first hard drive), "/dev/sdb" (second hard drive), and "/dev/sr0" (first optical drive). You might also see names like "/dev/sda1", which represents the first partition on the first hard drive. If you're finding this confusing, don't worry: a thorough understanding of these names is not required to use the GUI.