In a press release issued today, Seagate announced a new platform for hard drives that will come stock with strong encryption. Called "Seagate DriveTrust Technology", it is a hardware based security mechanism designed to interact with software, performing actual security functions on the drive itself to remove a potentially insecure middleman:
The platform, Seagate DriveTrust Technology, combines strong, fully automated hardware-based security with a programming foundation that makes it easy to add security-based software applications for organization-wide encryption key management, multi-factor user authentication and other capabilities that help lock down digital information at rest. DriveTrust Technology works by encasing the security operations in the hard drive, making the technology as easy and cost-effective to deploy as the drive itself.
Seagate includes an SDK as part of the platform, which software developers can use to create programs to interact with the technology. It supports a large set of industry standard encryption methods, such as AES and public key authentication, de-facto for common encryption and authentication. Their Momentus 5400 FDE.2 will be the first model released that fully supports the new technology. You can read the full press release in the comments section.