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I have a Seagate Momentus FDE (full disk encryption) drive. It works fine in my laptop - after I enter the password. I would like to use this drive with a USB/SATA cable (like this). However, there doesn't seem to be any way to enter the password.

Is there any way to do this? I am happy to purchase a special USB/SATA cable if necessary.

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According to the official FAQ here, you can in theory, but there aren't any solutions available:

Can you use the FDE drives in an external eSATA enclosure and still use the encryption capability? In theory, the answer is yes. Seagate FDE drives and the underlying technology would lend themselves to the type of device envisioned here. However, at this time there are no eSATA solutions available to purchase.

In a related design, Seagate has also manufactured (but no longer manufactures) a line of external drive under the Maxtor brand called "BlackArmor". It uses a Seagate Full Disk Encryption hard drive within a USB enclosure. In addition, it has software to support the Seagate Secure features available in the drive. See here the Maxtor BlackArmor User Guide.

Of course, you could always use software-only solutions to accomplish the "external encrypted drive" goal, with Whole Disk Encryption software such as FileVault2 (bundled on Mac OS), BitLocker (bundled on Windows) or some of the TrueCrypt spin-offs, such as VeraCrypt (stable release available) or CipherShed (still on pre-alpha ATOW).

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  • Thanks... I was coming to this conclusion, but it is good to have a second opinion. Software encryption is not an option as this is an existing FDE drive. In any case, I find the performance of software encryption disappointing, while FDEs perform just fine.
    – paj28
    Feb 4, 2015 at 15:18
  • @paj28 About the performance, for a good time now processors include Hardware AES encrypt/decrypt algorithms. I can't tell about the others, but I've already used FileVault 2 and unless you're doing serious video work or managing huge data transfers on a daily basis, the performance hit shouldn't be noticed.
    – glfabro
    Feb 4, 2015 at 15:52
  • Some benchmarks show the performance hit to be around 14%, others around 20%. But end users normally don't feel the penalty at all.
    – glfabro
    Feb 4, 2015 at 15:53

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