Rob Kampen wrote:
Excuse a really dumb question, how does this provide me with security? I assume it still uses the normal SATA interface and thus the OS writes to the drive as normal, but now it is encrypted onto the physical media..... so now I steal the laptop, or just the physical drive, plug it into my SATA controller and voila read all the encrypted data off the drive??? I am obviously missing something - there must be a key somewhere off the drive for this to work as a securely encrypted system.
Never used it myself but from the PDF http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/marketing/po_momentus_5400_fde.3.pdf
Consumers can easily integrate this drive and use their BIOS password to set up authentication. They get easy, strong encryption with no performance impact.
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So it sounds like your prompted for the password when you boot the system, probably during POST somehow. Maybe it only works on special modern versions of BIOSs.
nate