*countable infinities only

[Bryn M. Reeves]

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On 05/31/2012 07:21 PM, Gerry Reno wrote:
> Not yet.  But HDD technology is changing rapidly.  Just look at
> hybrid drives, SSD.
> 
> No reason they could not add this capability.

Not really. Both of these have been in development for years and have
only started to look mainstream fairly recently.

Look at the time that passed between IDEMA standardising "advanced"
(4KiB) sectoring and the time that that took to actually make it to
the market (not to mention that most of those parts are running in
compatibility mode today).

ATA has some existing security extensions to allow a drive to be
locked but these prevent any access until a correct password is
presented (and don't appear to be that secure against a well resourced
attacker).

If read-only support was standardised tomorrow it'd still be a number
of years before widespread support became available.

About the best you could do today would be to use an external drive
with a write-protect switch or to wire up the physical WP jumper on
the drive to an external switch on the case (I wouldn't flick it while
the system is running ;).

Regards,
Bryn.
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