now this looks interesting hiding data in the service area
so protected data wont get erased
makes you wonder if there some log on the drive that backups all email or anything else
on the computer which no data recovery engineer can see or recover.



http://www.recover.co.il/SA-cover/SA-cover.pdf

Sounds "Wile E. Coyote-ish" to me for a lot of obvious reasons.... first one is storage capacity : you have to be happy with few MB (megabytes!) in the happier case.

Encryption key is several bytes in length - can hide plenty in SA
And encrypt something else with them, even data on the same drive

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

This way maybe has a sense. But you have to use always the same type of drive and then next problem ( ? ) is something to access SA to get the key thru the ATA / SATA.
Needless to say that if it is a protection scheme, when SA is screwed, everything is screwed unless there is a backdoor (and if there is one, sooner or later someone will break in).