I'm pessimistic about prevention from reading the drive, and telling, if somebody did, so I would advice to use encryption too. You still don't know whether somebody did copy the encrypted data, but if he did, it is hard to break (hope so).
Now is the attacker clever, informed, does he have time, equipment and money? A simple trick, which will not work, if the bad guy is reading here, would be to stick a hair, which is hard to see, and easy to break, to your drive and the chassis, best: across the data cable.
Now if somebody removes the drive, he will break the hair without mentioning it. Except he read this advice, and acts very carefully.
If he is very well equiped, but you are too, you can take a hair which you perform a DNA-test on. You don't say whoms hair it is. The intruder might replace the hair with a random one, but can't replace it with a hair of the right DNA. But maybe he knows how to glue a broken hair together? Or he knows how to dissolve the glue? :)
10In the general case, someone who has physical access to a machine effectively owns the machine, Faronics' Deep Freeze or no. There are things you can do to make this harder but I seriously doubt it's possible to truly enforce. – Billy ONeal – 2011-07-18T14:09:39.810
3Many commenters have mentioned that physical access pretty much means you're screwed. A related point: if you determine that someone has physically touched your drive, who cares about proof they've copied data? Assume they have. – Cascabel – 2011-07-19T05:19:31.100
4I've always wondered this whenever someone sends in their laptop to Dell or HP. This is why I will never send my laptop into a warehouse with out first removing my hard drive. – James Mertz – 2011-08-14T01:48:00.553