Seagate has a solution: its third-generation Momentus FDE (full disk encryption) internal drives and Maxtor BlackArmor portables use 128-bit AES encryption to automatically secure the contents of the entire drive. Until now, Seagate had offered self-encryption only with its lower-capacity, lower rotational-speed drives (a 160GB drive that spins its platters at 5,400 RPM goes for around $150 at retail). The company is now shipping 320GB, 7,200 RPM drives to its OEM customers, and expects to have 500GB models in early 2009.

“Our solution is very difficult to crack,” said Joni Clark, product marketing manager for Seagate’s personal compute business unit, “because there’s an ASIC on the controller board and the key is in the media itself.” BIOS-managed Momentus FDE drives (the type a consumer would use) are FIPS 197 validated (meaning they’re approved by the U.S. Government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Computer Security Division for unclassified applications).

Enterprise-managed Momentus FDE drives (the type government agencies and Fortune 1000 businesses would deploy) features FIPS 197 validation too, but they’ve also been tested and accepted for use in U.S. national security systems by the super-secretive National Security Agency.

“Having your laptop with you wherever you go is as common as having your wallet with you,” said Clark. “But nobody wants to start over with an all-new laptop. Using our drives, you can retrofit the computer you already own.”

Source: Tom`s Hardware

A few months back Seagate revealed that they would start selling enterprise based Solid-State Drives (SSD) some time in 2009.

Some industry experts believe that selling the Solid-State idea to industry IT managers will be difficult because there is currently no clear and cut way to describe endurance or life expectancy of SSD’s. Seagate is currently working on this problem with JEDEC standards body.

Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development believes, “As companies like Seagate start to demonstrate field-proven reliability and endurance in enterprise applications, we’ll overcome those (solid-state drive) endurance fears.”

With time, SSDs will catch on since they offer much better mean time between failures (MTBF) than standard

 mechanical based hard drives, they generate much less heat, require much less power, and can also be compacted into a smaller form factor as well. This presents many attractive key qualities for SSDs – the trick now is to deploy and convince the industry to make the move.

Quoting Gregory Wong, an industry analyst at Forward Insights, said, “IT managers tend to be 

conservative, so the qualification time will be quite long—nine months to a year, and early adopters will be Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Facebook.”

As it currently stands, consumers won’t be going mainstream with SSD any time soon at all. Prices may continue to trickle on the downward slope, but don’t expect leaps and bounds just yet. Let the enterprise market play out first.

Source: www.tomshardware.com