Originally Posted by Zarf4

Skipping to the crypto. Almost all new drives support full disk encryption - if you go into the bios and set the HDD password this enables it. If you just set the administrator password on your laptop to prevent others from accessing the machine and your laptop gets stolen the thief would just have to take out your hdd/sdd, plug it into another machine and read your data. With the HDD password set the password must be sent to the drive before anything happens. You can't even easily reformat the drive without first sending the password. Very important to remove the password before retiring a drive as it may be machine dependent, I've taken a password protected drive from a T-series Lenovo, plugged it into a S-series Lenovo and couldn't unlock it even though I entered the same password. I believe that the utility chx1975 mentions just erases the password - this renders the data unusable (if a password was set) but allows the disk to be reformatted.