Anyone using SecureDoc Full-Disk Encryption for Mac from WinMagic?

Hi SilentCry,

Nice offer 🙂 But I have spoken directly to the WinMagic folks in the UK and they're OK to sell a single standalone copy for $155 (or €124) per seat. I strongly recommend getting in touch direct through their website.

I'll ping my contacts there a message and let them know that this thread exists so maybe they can come online and clear up any difficulties.

Rgds,

Guy

I am in contact with WinMagic now. They handed me a License for Evaluation. I run it with Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and Seagte FDE.4 ST9250317AS.
To make it short: It works! It asks for the Passphrase on power up, it suspends to disk (suspend to RAM is disabled) and it installs and configures flawless. I will test it in more deep during the weekend but first impression ist excellent.

Hi SilentCry,

I'm delighted to hear that it worked well for you. Unfortunately, my experience with the software so far has been less straightforward.

I tried to install it on my late 2006 C2D 17" MBP and it rendered it unbootable 😟 I had quite a job to get it back to life but, thanks to SuperDuper, I'm back again 🙂 I currently don't have the software installed. However, I'm awaiting some more info from WinMagic to hopefully explain what happened so I can avoid the issue.

My advice is try the software if you meet the requirements but make sure you have the install disk and a complete clone backup of your disk before you do 🙂

I'll report back if I get any more from WinMagic and if I have the nerve to try again 🙂

Rgds,

Guy

Hi all,

An update to my previous (somewhat gloomy) post.

I have now got WinMagic SecureDoc running on my laptop, too. It's currently encrypting the hard drive and it's going to take a while 🙂

During my efforts last night to get my laptop back to life, I'd noticed some messages when booting in single user mode that said that PGP WDE driver was loaded and was having trouble finding the EFI! I did have PGP Desktop 10 installed but I had never licensed WDE, let alone enabled it. I have had issues with PGP anyway so I decided to decrypt all my volumes and uninstall PGP completely.

I then re-downloaded the software from WinMagic and with my heart in my mouth reinstalled. It worked 🙂 So, mark up two happy evaluations so far.

Updated advice: Make sure that PGP is completely uninstalled before trying to install unless you have a few hours to spare and a very good backup! 😉

Rgds,

Guy

www.winmagic.com

Hi - it is getting harder and harder to determine which Momentus has the Enterprise support built in and which one is BIOS only (unusable for Macs). They are usually only different in the last two digits.
For example the ST9250317AS is Enterprise whilest the ST9250327AS is not (up to my knowledge). But even though I know that I can not find any seagate data sheet. (I for sure know because I have the 17AS and it works).
My theory is that the one ending with a "teen" are Enterprise, those with "twenty" are BIOS Models.
So, SevenTEEN AS ist Enterprise, TWENTYseven ist BIOS. But that is just a theory.

OK, thanks for the links. As I said, it is only a theory... ;.)

But please do not overestimate the advantage of 7200rpm. I have no link at hand right now but I remember tests where 5.400 rpm notebook hdds where ahead of the 7.200 models.

My choice is clear: 5.400 with hardware encryption. Although my main concern is the frozen RAM attack solved by hw-encryption I also would dare to bet on that the hw-5.400 combo is faster than the sw-7.200.

Hi SilentCry and idifix

I have a clear statement from the mac engineering guys at winmagic that they have tested the st9500421as with a mac and securedoc. I'm hoping to get hold of one to move from sw encryption to hw encryption.

Rgds

Guy