Does anyone have any experience of using the ATA secure erase commands from hdparm?
My understanding is that a BIOS can lock the drive from responding to the commands, and that some do and some don't. Mine appears to (hdparm -I /dev/sda shows "frozen" in the "Security" section), but I don't know how common it is to find a BIOS that allows this to work.
I have several drives to wipe and I'd certainly consider building a PC for the job but I have no idea how to find out if a BIOS will let me do it before I buy it.