The majority of encryption suites that people have access to today, both at home and in business, tend to revolve around software solutions that require programs to encrypt and decrypt various sets of data. What if you wanted something at a lower level than that? For the home user, there isn't much out there. Recently, however, Seagate introduced an addition to their Momentus line that gives you hardware encryption on the disk itself. Going beyond the simple "deny access" that modern hard drives can be capable of, it does encryption operations on the drive firmware itself, that relies on 128-bit AES. The primary advantage of this situation above software suites is speed, given that the hardware on the drive can more than meet the drives capabilities, all without requiring the CPU to be heavily loaded or create extra I/O operations for the OS to handle. Starting with the Momentus 5400.2 FDE, it has functions for businesses to that will allow easy management via software and.
These drives may appear as soon as early next year, in 60GB to 160GB capacities. How will they perform? Will it be useful? Considering how unbelievably easy it is to have a laptop lost or stolen, many people would appreciate that form of built-in security.