SSD – Encrypted Sold State Drive

About 6 months ago, I’ve decided to upgrade my laptop (see specs below) and purchase an SSD as my operating system drive.
For those of you who don’t know SSD, stands for Solid State Drive, Is a new form of data storage of hard drives. Similar to a USB storage device, an SSD uses a single/multiple chips to store data. Because of this, SSD is superior to Hard-Drives (or H.D.D) in several fashions:

• It allows faster data transfer rates – While a High-End SATA3 desktop H.D.D today can reach up to a maximum of 150MBp/s read/write, an average SATA3 SSD drive can reach a whopping 500MBp/s read/write
• It allows faster access times –Hard drives access time can go as low as 6 milliseconds, while an average SSD will reach 0.6 milliseconds easily
• More durable and shock resistant – Having no moving parts, SSDs are able to absorb shocks 10 times stronger without being damaged (Standard H.D.D has a 150G, SSD has more than 1500G in some cases), in other words, if you had a 50 meter SATA cable, and you’d throw off a 50 meter building both an H.D.D and a SSD, while active, the SSD will have no problems operating, while the H.D.D may have write failures or even stop working for a little while.
• Better support in Allocation Unit Size – While Hard Drives are just going passed 4k, SSD can support up to 8MB which can improve file access times and file transfer rates if the drive stores large files mostly.

While the above features will probably be familiar to most SSD users, there’s one added feature that up until now was a bit sneaky: Real-time Drive Encryption.
At its first boot, the drive generates a random number, and with that number, the drive use encrypts the data before it goes into the chip. In order to access the data, the drive sends a signal with the pre-generated random number, and only after approval can the operating system read/write from the chip. According to the manufacturers, this random number is not stored anywhere on the SSD to prevent unauthorized access to the data.
Although you might think this is an advantage, this actually works a double-edged sword: in case your SSD suffers physical damage (suffers electric surge, heavy beating, deep fried in oil, etc.), the data will be significantly harder to extract. Thanks to its encryption, your data will be secured behind a AES 128-256 bit encryption (depends on the model, newer ones such as the OCZ Agility 3 have the 256 bit support), or even worse, you can’t disable this feature.
In my case, I’ve purchased the award winning Vertex-2 from OCZ. The drive was crazy fast until suddenly one day it stopped working: Windows had trouble booting, rebooted and the BIOS was unable to detect the drives, despite my efforts. I turned to a recovery company in attempt to save some of the data, but they told me since the data is secured, and charged 8 times more for the extraction.
My lesson, and I hope whoever reads this may benefit from my experience, backup your stuff: External drives, NAS, Flash drives, Cloud storage or whatnot. Never compromise!
Cheers q[^_^]p