Hdparm problem with USB flash drive

I have a Sandisk Extreme GO USB 3.1 which is experiencing slow writes. I’m talking to them about RMA but I read that the issue can be fixed with an ATA secure erase command. The basic issue is that it doesn’t support TRIM, so gets slow after a while.

I’ve been trying to use hdparm to do the erase from a Kali Linux live distro running on another USB drive. Every time I try to do anything, even get drive info (-I) I get a SG_IO: bad/missing sense data error. It can’t read anything, says drive is zero bytes in size, zero sectors etc.

gparted can see and partition the drive no problem.

Other people with this drive have reported hdparm to work and fix the issue. Any ideas?