Thanks kairon for this news in our Back Page News section of the forums.
By announcing its IC7-MAX3 mainboard with the Secure IDE technology, ABIT opened the doors to a brand-new era of data-protection using hardware means. As we told you last week, ABIT integrated a special chip that does not allow reading from HDD unless a special key is installed.
Secure IDE is a device that connects to an IDE HDD and has a special decoder key; without this key, the hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Even if the drive is removed from your PC, no one will be able to read data from it. ABIT claims that its Secure IDE will keep the Government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa/Soulseek files forever.
ABIT’s Secure IDE seems to be pretty easy to use: you should connect your Parallel ATA HDD via special add-in device with the eNOVA X-Wall chip and then perform typical Fdisk, Format procedures in DOS environment. Each time you boot up your computer, you will have to use your “key” to access the HDD.
News source: X-Bit Labs
By announcing its IC7-MAX3 mainboard with the Secure IDE technology, ABIT opened the doors to a brand-new era of data-protection using hardware means. As we told you last week, ABIT integrated a special chip that does not allow reading from HDD unless a special key is installed.
Secure IDE is a device that connects to an IDE HDD and has a special decoder key; without this key, the hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Even if the drive is removed from your PC, no one will be able to read data from it. ABIT claims that its Secure IDE will keep the Government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa/Soulseek files forever.
ABIT’s Secure IDE seems to be pretty easy to use: you should connect your Parallel ATA HDD via special add-in device with the eNOVA X-Wall chip and then perform typical Fdisk, Format procedures in DOS environment. Each time you boot up your computer, you will have to use your “key” to access the HDD.
News source: X-Bit Labs
Even though there are bunch of technologies for protecting computers from unauthorized access, they are either not efficient or too expensive for SOHO users. The technology implemented by ABIT seems to have the right balance between price and proof against cracking, so, it may become popular eventually. Of course, we still have to find out how exactly it works and also reveal all its pros and cons.
Currently ABIT only offers Secure IDE technology in its IC7-MAX3 mainboard for Intel Pentium 4 and Prescott processors, however, later this year the feature will also be available on a MAX3 mainboard for AMD CPUs.
ABIT claims that its Secure IDE will keep the Government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa/Soulseek files forever.</quote>
I do hope people realize this wont offer any protection from the internet. Infact, it's more or less useless when your computer is turned on - such a security feature is only really useful if you're trying to protect sensitive data.
If someone steals your computer, (and not your USB key) then you can rest with reasonable assurance that your data is "unrecoverable." Of course, so is your computer. If a court orders you to turn over data on the drive as evidence, however, you're required by law to hand over the USB key as well. And if you knowingly destroy your USB key to bar the authorities of aquiring evidence against you...guess again.
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