Arch Linux

ectospasm

Member

Registered: 2015-08-28

Posts: 297

[SOLVED] nvme sanitize concerns

I just received a ThinkPad X1 Carbon, 11th Generation, with a 2TiB NVMe M.2 SSD.  Earlier this morning, I ran the following command from the 2023-09-01 Arch ISO:

nvme sanitize /dev/nvme --sanact=0x02

It returned to the shell immediately, which I think was expected.  Right after that, I ran:

nvme sanitize-log /dev/nvme

It showed that the sanitize operation was in progress, SSTAT showed code 0x102 (or maybe 0x002, I'm wriitng this from memory after several hours).  Within a few seconds, a repeated nvme sanitize-log showed SSTAT of 0x101, which I think means success (the nvme-sanitize-log(1) manual page is not well written for 0x100, so I'm not exactly sure how to interpret it).  I'm pretty sure 0x001 means complete with success (the SPROG parameter is at 65535).

My first concern is that it only took mere seconds to run before it said it was complete.  The Arch Wiki article about this suggests this should take a long time.  The note says it took two to three hours with a 512GiB NVME SSD, so I was planning for it to take severl more hours since my 2TiB disk is four times the size.  But it only took a few seconds.  The output of nvme sanitize-log suggested this should take 60 seconds if I'm reading it correctly, but in my estimation it was even faster than that.

The other (lesser) concern is that lsblk -f still shows the old GPT label and all of the existing partitions.  I'm not as concerned about this, since I definitely did not write any data to the disk.  I was half expecting to not see any partition table anymore, but that might be my misunderstanding of nvme sanitize.  Then again it may have had the old partition table in memory, I just now remembered that I forgot to run partprobe after doing this.

The X1 Carbon is now packed away, awaiting my wife to wrap it as a Christmas gift.  She gave me strict instructions that I'm not to play with this laptop until I unwrap it Christmas morning, so it will be some time before I actually get to install Arch on it (likely with the 2023-12-DD version of the Arch ISO).

EDIT:  I looked more closely at the Estimated time for Block Erase, and it definitely said 60 on my Western Digital NVMe SSD.  But it was even faster than the 60s it expected.  I guess that's just an estimate, not exact.  And I'm pretty sure the old Windows 11 Home partitions (I could not choose Linux or no operating system when ordering this laptop) still showed because I forgot to run partprobe.

Last edited by ectospasm (2023-09-28 01:16:13)