Door is locked
"The user does not need to escrow the encryption key to maintain data recoverability because the key is held in the drive."
but the key is under the mat. Shhh, don't tell anyone.
Seagate has extended its range of encrypting drives to cover all its enterprise products. The Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option is now available across the Savvio 15K.2, Savvio 10K.3, Constellation and Cheetah 15K.7 product ranges. These drives should work with users' encryption infrastructures. Seagate says Intel and LSI are …
... is the only way that this would be considered "suitable for national security". If you do not enter the appropriate passphrase (after suitable number of attempts), the encryption key block wipes, preventing circumvention, unauthorized access, and (yes, unfortunately) key recovery.
Otherwise, like AC stated above, "the key is under the mat" for anyone to take a "pro-active" approach and start scanning the chips on the drive for the key storage block.
However, if they just did that first instead of mucking around with the obvious interface, all bets would be off (and your information compromised), eh?
I am still waiting for the day when we will have an electrically non-conductive epoxy resin that cannot be dissolved without taking the board/chips with it _AND_ has very good heat disappation properties. Even then, with skillful drilling, all it might do is slow them down, eh?
Whats the betting that these drives will have an undocumented debug serial port that will allow recovery of the key/password if you have a level shifter cable and the correct magic incantations:
http://www.llamma.com/xbox/download/ST310014ACE%20unlocking%20tutorial%20english.pdf
A bit like the seagate drives in the xbox 1