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Hard Drive Security Enhanced

The best security money can buy for those for whom a password just won't suffice

Mar 12, 2007 15:31 GMT  ·  By
Seagate Momentus
   Seagate Momentus

There should be a commercial for this: "Are you paranoid? Can't sleep at night thinking your data isn't secure? Wanna secure your information without actually putting it into a safe? Try out the latest technology in hard drive security, it's Paranoid-Encryption! Paranoid-Encryption, the paranoia is real." Well, maybe the idea for this commercial isn't quite what Seagate had in mind when they put out on the market their new line of hard drives called Momentus 5400 FDE.2, but for some people, this is the answer to their prayers.

The features included in this line of products are AES encryption, a 1.5Gb/s Serial ATA interface, 8MB buffer, 5400RPM, capacities ranging from 80 to 160GB and the possibility of withstanding a 900Gs shock in non-operating mode. Along side this line of products, we also encounter the Momentus 7200.2. This has basically the same main characteristics as the 5400 FDE.2, but it features a higher speed for the platters at 7200RPM and the possibility of having 8 or 16MB of buffer memory, lacking the encryption side of the deal.

This encryption takes place every time information is written on the hard drive and without a proper password, well, there's not much you can do. The technology used by Seagate is called DriveTrust and it provides hardware based Full Disk Encryption (FDE) for better security and safer use.

While the Momentus 7200.2 line of products is faster and allows users to achieve that extra amount of speed you usually don't get on a laptop, Momentus FDE.2 is designed specially for corporate use, this being the relative domain in which loosing a database containing some 250.000 employees would be a bad thing. Nevertheless, there are users outside of corporations or the military who might consider they need such protection and for this segment, a company has put the Seagate hard drives to good use. ASI Computer Technologies will ship computers with Seagate Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drives and, of course, these will feature a fingerprint reader, to make the package even more interesting.