On Sun, 23 Sep 2012, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
As the interface for encrypting and locking an SED appears to be the same as for locking a normal drive using the security commands from hdparm should in theory work. This is assuming the BIOS pads passwords that are smaller than 32 bytes the same way as hdparm does, which is with NUL bytes.
Hdparm currently only accepts passwords as strings, so if the BIOS uses binary/hex strings for the password it could be problematic to unlock the same drive with hdparm. It should be quite simple to patch hdparm to accept hex strings as passwords though.
I have used drive (un)locking with hdparm on USB drives so (un)locking an external SED should be possible.
Interesting. I'd never investigated hdparm as a drive-password interface. I'll certainly keep that in mind.