I’ve been asked by a number of people about using the Seagate Momentus FDE.2 or 7200 FDE laptop drives in a Mac to do Full Disk Encryption (FDE) without having to purchase third party software. Well, I tried it out and regrettably the answer here is that the Momentus drives will not work for much the same reason that ESX can’t work with the Mac: BIOS. The Mac uses EFI, not a BIOS and therefore a number of applications that bypass various forms of hardware abstraction (and in this case hardware that bypasses it) will not work on a Mac, even if you’re using Boot Camp to run Linux or Windows…
So for now, no Momentus drives for your Mac computers. Sorry kids, you’re still stuck with TrueCrypt (for non boot volumes), CheckPoint or PGP on the Mac if you have an FDE requirement you must adhere to. However, if you are running a *nix or Windows box the Seagate 320GB Momentus 7200 is probably the best laptop drive I’ve ever used (I use the one I got in a Thinkpad). It does AES, holds plenty of data at 320GB and is really quiet and pretty resistant to getting jostled around.
Note: Someone recently said to me that more and more OSen were moving over to EFI from BIOS, but it’s never a good idea to base infrastructure plans for an enterprise on a perceived trend…
Note: As of mid-December 2008, WinMagic allows you to use FDE on Mac OS X with the Momentus drives. Thanks to Joel for pointing that out. 🙂
