Most hard drives (and presumably SSDs) contain embedded microcontrollers to handle translation between the various protocol levels (USB, SATA, etc) and the raw data on the platters/FLASH cells, often running i/o drivers on top of some microcontroller-specific RTOS.
So ... surely the ideal technique would be to write a driver for the RTOS that generates a stream of data on the fly that looks like an ExFAT filesystem full of directories and email folder hierarchies containing Lorem Ipsum text? That way, it keeps feeding an unending supply of junk back to the imaging hardware (which probably isn't anything as high level/simple as "plug into a PC, mount it, and copy everything"). Yet if they open up the case and look inside, they'll see a genuine hard drive with genuine platters.
An exotic device that smells like tradecraft is a great way to get past the bored rent-a-cops and meet some some serious counterintelligence investigators.
Most hard drives (and presumably SSDs) contain embedded microcontrollers to handle translation between the various protocol levels (USB, SATA, etc) and the raw data on the platters/FLASH cells, often running i/o drivers on top of some microcontroller-specific RTOS.
So ... surely the ideal technique would be to write a driver for the RTOS that generates a stream of data on the fly that looks like an ExFAT filesystem full of directories and email folder hierarchies containing Lorem Ipsum text? That way, it keeps feeding an unending supply of junk back to the imaging hardware (which probably isn't anything as high level/simple as "plug into a PC, mount it, and copy everything"). Yet if they open up the case and look inside, they'll see a genuine hard drive with genuine platters.