Seagate announced a new data encryption technology that will allow consumers to purchase hard disk drives that are encrypted without the need of software or custom installation — something many consumers simply choose not to do.
The Seagate Momentus FDE (full-disk encryption) laptop HDD will operate at 5400-rpm and 7200-rpm, with storage capacities up to 320GB. The company also plans on releasing a 500GB model in the future.
Seagate is selling the FDEs to OEMs. Dell is the first manufacturer interested in using the HDDs. Both personal and corporate clients will use the HDDs with different levels of security. A home user installs the drive, enters a BIOS password, then all of their data will then be protected using the AES encryption.
Corporate users will benefit from McAfee EPO, which is used for encryption policy management, security auditing, and authentication.
A published 2007 Annual CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security survey indicates a laptop is stolen in the United States every 53 seconds, with 97 percent never found or turned over. Most manufacturers offer a basic level of data encryption, but most customers never actually install necessary software — this will help protect users better.
Other companies also plan to release similar hard drives that have self-encryption technology, but very few products have been announced.
2 Comments
Transparent data encryption on hard drives is risky business. One is better off only encrypting nominated partitions or folders. Furthermore, for the paranoids out there - who exactly holds the cypher keys to "unlock" the encryption ?
"who exactly holds the cypher keys to "unlock" the encryption ?"
I do, but don't worry -- it's safely hidden under my mattress. Oh, crap. I guess maybe it isn't so safe anymore.
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