How We Tested Solid State Drives

We used two identical Lenovo T520 notebooks, that use an Intel i5 chipset, as our test bed. We used a network boot to load a copy of Windows 7 onto the notebook after we entered HDD Master and User passwords onto each drive and formatted them for NTFS.

We used several tools including Linux hdparm, (gs)smartctl, SpinRight, and none were able to read or decrypt any of the drives after we moved drives to the alternate T520 notebooks.

Slideshow: Encrypted SSDs deliver security, speed

We were unable to disassemble the firmware on any drive to find a password we'd set in clear text. We did not open any drive and try to fetch passwords from chips internal to the drive assembly. All attempts at obtaining any information about drive contents without passwords were thwarted; we could not read the drive data without them.

Return to main test