[Infowarrior] - Seagate ships hard drives with encryption

Mon Mar 12 14:38:46 UTC 2007

Seagate ships hard drives with encryption

By Joris Evers
http://news.com.com/Seagate+ships+hard+drives+with+encryption/2100-1029_3-61
66180.html

Story last modified Mon Mar 12 06:30:09 PDT 2007

Seagate Technology on Monday plans to announce the first manufacturer to
sell laptop PCs with Seagate's new hard drive that has built-in encryption
technology.

Fremont, Calif.-based ASI Computer Technologies will start selling computers
equipped with Seagate's Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drive next month, Seagate said
in a statement. The computers, called ASI C8015, will be sold through a
number of ASI's partners, including Newegg.com, PowerNotebooks.com and
ZipZoomfly.com, an ASI representative said.

In addition to an 80GB Seagate drive, the ASI machine will feature a
fingerprint reader, 15.4-inch display, Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile 2.0GHz
processor, Nvidia graphics with 256MB memory, 1GB RAM and a DVD rewritable
drive, according to ASI. The price is expected to be about $2,150.

The Seagate drives are equipped with the company's new "DriveTrust"
technology, which the company promotes as a simpler way to safeguard data
stored on laptops. The encryption technology is designed to make life
tougher for computer thieves and to prevent embarrassing breaches.

ASI is a small player among notebook makers. It ships "whitebook" computers
that don't carry a name brand and are sold by resellers who sometimes put
their own names on the hardware.

Seagate is also in discussions with major, brand name laptop makers and
expects to announce more deals for its new hard drive midyear.

"We will obviously be selling this to worldwide resellers," said Michael
Hall, a Seagate spokesman.

Seagate pitches its encrypting hard disk as an alternative to full-disk
encryption software, such as products sold by PGP and PointSec Mobile
Technologies. Additionally, high-end editions of Microsoft's upcoming
Windows Vista operating system include an encryption feature called
BitLocker.
The Momentus 5400 FDE.2 offers up to 160GB of capacity, a Serial ATA
interface, and hardware-based Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption,
according to Seagate. ASI will ship its laptop with Wave Systems' management
software to simplify enterprise use of the computers, it said.