Nope, they started in 2003. The Splunk bug was a little misleading. The problem was if you were sending logs to it that used a two-digit date it wouldn't read them right after the date rolled. If everything was using four-digit dates there is no problem. The fix was just a tweak to the regex in a date parsing xml file.

I was a sales engineer for a company that sold software that managed the Opal SED's. We knew, and told, customers that Sleep mode completely bypassed the drive authentication. Our software disabled Sleep mode in Windows and forced Hibernate instead because of this. It's been 4-5 years at this point so who knows if that's still the case. My point is though this is less "discovery" as much as a known limitation that anyone doing a POC or asking good questions in a demo would have know about.

I've seen this eluded to earlier in the thread, but personally I think it worth looking at HD's that support native FDE instead of a software solution. You don't have the same OS limitations, performance hits, or potential incompatibilities. Nearly all drive manufacturers have announced some sort of native encryption and some are already shipping. We are using Seagate drives today in our Dell systems and its incredibly painless.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/momentus/momentus_5400_fde.2/