Seagate Momentus FDE

[nolosoft]

Anyone has experience with the Seagate Momentus FDE hard drives? How does it work? I learned fo far that the data is encrypted on the fly by the hard disk hardware, so is the software to administer passwords embedded in the disk, or is that some extra application that takes care of it?

[atari]

When you purchase the FDE hard drive, it comes as is without any software. You have to buy an extra software that enables the FDE hard drive security features.

[GildaPrice]

I have the Seagate Momentus FDE SATA 500 GB 5400 RPM hard drive, and it is awesome. No program in memory, the only change in user experience is one login screen. Encryption is ON all the time, you can't even disable it. You can only enable access to the disk which is done through a software that you have to buy extra. It is pretty pricey, but it is worth it.

[nolosoft]

Great. I am interested in knowing the principle behind it, anyone knows? I heard it is banned in China, so it must be pretty good.

[atari]

Great. I am interested in knowing the principle behind it, anyone knows? I heard it is banned in China, so it must be pretty good.

The principle is ingenious. When the PC boots up, it does so using a software permanently placed on a separate read-only 128MB partition. This software is called from a so-called "shadow master boot record" that is placed in this partition too. After the PC boots up in this first step, then it performs warm boot after which a boot from the regular partition follows. So, when the PC starts, it boots up from a shadow read-only partition, no user data is stored there. If the correct password is not supplied, the logon process never makes it to see even one block from the partition containing user data.