Alereon posted:

While not exactly what you're looking for, Intel did an internal audit of their drives that found that only 128bits of the 256bit AES key were used, which resulted in a drive recall since they promised AES256 and only delivered AES128.
You're talking about on HDDs, right? The difference is that the ATA password set on the hard drive doesn't actually encrypt anything, it's just saved on the drive and the firmware checks to see if you supplied a matching password (or supervisor password) in order to communicate with the system. If you can bypass this check or replace the password all the data is there for the taking. On a Sandforce SSD for example, data is ALWAYS encrypted with a default key as part of the scrambling and error correction steps. When you set an ATA password, it generates a new key based on your password and uses this to encrypt data, so even if someone is able to pass the password check they can only get to encrypted data.