I am confused,surely non-citizens have no rights or recourse to the law at an airport?
In any case, I am concerned that your approach would be defeated if they took an image of your hard drive and threw some basic tools at it. They probably have this as a kit.
On a laptop? All laptops I've seen have the hard disk plugged directly into the motherboard, with no cables in between. Having a SATA cable is more of a desktop thing.
Perhaps nowadays it's the norm to have it all soldered in but I'd just not buy such.
That said, I'd imagine there's an economies-of-scale advantage to having soldered-on drives (to say nothing of the economic benefits of un-upgradability: sorry folks, but there aren't enough people to whom part-swap upgrades are important to sway the hardware industry at large on this issue, though a few small manufacturers/lines will probably target that market). As a result, I'd imagine that we'll see more and more of them in years to come, though I'd be happy to be wrong about that.
'course, I don't recommend bringing your data into a country you consider hostile regardless of whether you've set it up so a cursory search doesn't find it. If the country really is hostile to your interests, that won't stop them if they want your info.
I leave a dummy partition with Windows, office and other shortcuts and a wallpaper of a cat during my US visits. I also have both a facebook and a gmail subscribed to all the spam you can get.
Not because I have any criminal activities but my customers deserve to have their information protected.
If authorities want to check my private and work data, they can ask nicely through a judge.