Hard disk lock - secure enough?

["Per Niila Albinsson" <per () ruokto com>]

Hi 

Do anyone on this list have experience of pen-testing hard drive locks? 

I've been googling around to gather information of the security implications 
of deploying hard disk locks, and the opinions seems to be very scattered. 
Could hard drive locks be an alternative to hard disk encryption solutions? 

As I've understood you can't break this protection with less effort then 
removing the magnetic media from the physical harddrive, or would it be 
possible to exchange the eeprom where the password is stored? Is there any 
known way to reverse engineer the password or read it from the eeprom? Is 
there usually any brute-force protection implemented that rends the hard 
disk unusable after a numerous of unsuccessful authentication attempts. 

Any input would be welcome. 


/Per Niila Albinsson

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