More cool news from Seagate this week, they announced yesterday the release of two new HDD hard drives, one for notebooks and one for PCs. The new 2.5" HDD is very spacious at 250GB and will be part of their Momentus line, though with other 250GB units already in the market it isn't terribly special. It will feature perpendicular recording and a SATA-II interface, using a 5400RPM spindle speed.
The other unit is more interesting. They are aiming a new behemoth 1TB disk at businesses and enterprise environments, adding on to their Barracuda line a technology they are calling Full Disc Encryption (imagine that). The self-encrypting technology relies on AES, and can couple various authentication technologies to make sure data on the disk is kept safe such as biometrics.
Encrypting a hard drive might be a simpler way of securing data than encrypting a file system, though soon it seems both options will be readily available. No mention is made about when these encrypting hard drives specifically, only that they will be available sometime in 2008. You can read the full press release at Seagate's site.