Secure hard drives

Seagate has begun shipping the long-awaited secure hard drives that could significantly reduce the risk of data theft incidents on laptops.

Joni Clark, one of Seagate’s marketing managers, announced the launch of the company’s latest hard drives. The expert said Seagate recognized the importance of security in data storage more than five years ago. Since then, developers have been constantly working on various protection technologies. Development of the Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drives, which have just been on the market, began two years ago, precisely with the aim of protecting the data stored on them more effectively against possible data theft.

Seagate’s new hard drives encrypt stored data immediately as you write, while decrypting it in real time while reading. The new storage devices work with 128-bit AES encryption. All the user needs to do is enter their password at system startup. According to Seagate, without this, the data cannot be recovered in an interpretable form. An important feature of the new hard disks is that the hardware required for data encryption is integrated, so that only minimal processor time is used during encryption and decryption.

Seagate-equipped hard drives were the first to be housed in ASI notebooks. The basic configuration of these laptops includes an 80GB Momentus 5400 FDE.2 winchester, but soon 100, 120 and 160 GB hard drives will also be available. They all operate at 5400 rpm and support a 3 Gbps SATA interface. In addition to a secure winchester, ASI’s new machines include a fingerprint reader and a TPM chip. All of this raises the price of computers by about 20 percent compared to laptops in a similar category.