With Linux, the easiest way to not only delete the whole drive but to also trim it at the same time is blkdiscard command. Combine that with an external M.2 USB storage and you can clean up pretty much any drive. But what if your drive tells you “ioctl failed: Operation not supported”? Well, then it’s time for some udev trickery.

For me this issue happened with my Sabrent USB Enclosure which I found a really useful for accessing M.2 SSDs. Not only it supports both NVMe and SATA drives but it also has rarely decent tooless mechanism. And all that at a reasonable cost.

The only downside was not supporting trim operation directly. However, this was not due to the device itself but just due to Ubuntu not recognizing its capabilities. And all we need to correct this is its vendor and product ID which can be easily found using lsusb command.

With those two parameters, we can create a special rule telling Linux to allow trim (unmap) operation.

cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/42-sabrent-storage.rules
ACTION=="add|change", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_disk", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bda", ATTRS{idProduct}=="9210", ATTR{provisioning_mode}:="unmap"
EOF

To apply this without reboot, just reload all rules:

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

And that’s it. Now you can use blkdiscard, fstrim, or whatever other trimming method you love.