From: "Tony Ingenoso" 

Why not put it in the drive controller card so its completely transparent
to the OS.  Then a dedicated processor can do all the work.  With a big
enough onboard writeback and intelligent prefectching cache, the perf hit
would probably be minimal.

During the machine's boot sequence, the controller's BIOS could ask for a
password/key, hand that to the onboard CPU(s) to validate so the (far more
hackable) BIOS isn't processing the password validation code, then give
back a yea/nay to the controller BIOS.  You could give'em maybe three tries
before you issue the commands to waste the drive ;->

If you had a drive that conspired with a matched controller, it could be
real interesting - then even if the drive were moved to a different
controller to attempt a hack, interesting things could be done.  ex. when
mated with a correct controller, the drive physically opens up OK.  If
mated to somthing else that doesn't stroke it the right way at power up,
then it automatically reports everything on it as a bad sector, or maybe
commences an automatic LL reformat

"Geo."  wrote in message
news:40237775$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> Not me, because if you have physical access to the machine then the only
> type of file system that's going to keep you out is one that uses really
> good encryption, and really good encryption is going to make it
> comparatively slow and very cpu intensive. Even the mini systems I used to
> run were exposed in this way, OS/2, Linux, AIX, pretty much everything I've
> used since has been exposed as well.
>
> Geo.

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