Intel 320 SSD & Encryption

[Avery1]

I notice in the Intel documentation, that the 320 supports AES-128 encryption, with use of an *ATA* password... and it specifically mentions 'PC'. I'm not finding many details about using this with MacOS

Does anyone know if the encryption will work with an EFI or other Mac password?

Is anyone running one of these on MacOS, encrypted?

 

[ActionableMango]

I don't know anything about ATA passwords, but one of the expected new features of Lion is whole disk encryption. You might as well wait for that and get it free with the OS and supported by Apple.

 

[Cindori]

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[Avery1]

I don't know anything about ATA passwords, but one of the expected new features of Lion is whole disk encryption. You might as well wait for that and get it free with the OS and supported by Apple.

I'm aware, but that is months away, and who knows how long it will take for this Filevault re-write to be stable. Since I'm operating as a consultant, I can't necessarily wait for that.

So... no one knows if this is possible?

 

[ActionableMango]

I looked around out of of curiosity and got the feeling that the ATA password is not very well supported on any platform. And for Macs the Seagate FAQ is pretty clear:

At this time, Apple Mac systems with EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) in lieu of BIOS do not support traditional ATA security passwords.

AFAIK the only existing FDE solution for OS X is PGP . I don't know anything about that product and at least one other user here on the forum feels its only a matter of time before PGP FDE on OS X creates an unrecoverable failure.

My own intention is to use Lion FDE toward the end of the year after everyone else has been beta testing it for a few months.

 

[dyn]

Whole disk encryption and ssd's do not match. Ssd's will become a lot slower when you fill them which is exactly what whole disk encryption does. Buying an ssd would be a waste of money, you're better off with a much cheaper hdd.

 

[thepawn]

Whole disk encryption and ssd's do not match. Ssd's will become a lot slower when you fill them which is exactly what whole disk encryption does. Buying an ssd would be a waste of money, you're better off with a much cheaper hdd.

Eh, not entirely true in practice. I bit-locker by Windows drive on my laptop (SSD) and its still waaay faster then a traditional HDD.

There is also SafeGuard from Sophos that does full-disk on OSX.