Take the 2-minute tour ×  My partition /dev/sda3 on an SSD drive
doesn't contain any filesystem, but it contains garbage. How do
I do a TRIM/DISCARD operation on the whole partition?
share|improve this question I'm a little confused.. Do you want
to destroy the existing garbage data? Can you not just format
the partition? You could use dd to write that partition with
zeros or random data (from /dev/zero or /dev/random). I'm just
confused as I'm not sure if "TRIM/DISCARD" means something
really particular that isn't covered by my suggestions..? –  Doc
Jul 8 '11 at 19:31 I think the point is that he doesn't want to
write any data, he wants the SSD to ERASE the flash block but
leave it empty so it's available to be written to, known as
freshing an SSD drive. –  Chris Thompson Jul 8 '11 at 20:44 ATA
Secure Erase wiki ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase
–  joe Jul 7 '12 at 22:46 @joe: Your ATA Secure Erase link
doesn't even mention parititions. I don't want to erase the
entire drive, just a partition.