I have been following this guide on how to secure erase an SSD (trying to improve the performance of mine, which currently only writes at about 30mb/s seq).

However, I'm using an USB-->Sata docking device to avoid having the harddrive frozen. Apparently using this solution the SATA device is recognized as a SCSI drive, which is giving me trouble.

I use the "hdparm -I /dev/sda" command with those parameters, and I get the error;

HDIO_DRIVE_CMD (identify) failed: Invalid Exchange

After a lot of googling on the issue I can't seem to find anyone who has actually solved this problem. However, I have not tried to just go ahead and use the secure erase. So I'm not sure if this would actually still work.

I would love any and all input I can get on this, especially on whether it will still work to do a secure erase with the drive being recognized as a SCSI drive.

The drive itself is a Samsung 256gb SSD (pm800), I'm sure you can understand my reluctance to go through this procedure without feeling reasonably safe that I won't mess it up beyond repair.