Yeah, Seagate's uber-secure 2.5-inch Momentus 5400 FDE.2
hard drive has been available on the open market for some time, but Dell is looking to become to first
big player to offer it up within its laptops. Starting "this week," the Latitude
D630 and D830 will be available with the crypto drive as an option, and it will come bundled with the Embassy Trust Suite from software company Wave Systems. Officially, Dell has yet to reveal how much it'll cost to upgrade to the drive, but judging by the Higher Education order portal, swapping in a 120GB encrypted HDD will run you $152.10 more than the vanilla 60GB unit the D630 comes with.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Speed addict... @ Sep 19th 2007 12:56AM
I bet if you add the additional time it takes to boot a 5400rpm drive vs. a 7200rpm, you're not going to care about security, you'll want to throw it out the window... Use TrueCrypt, it's free and works well with portable USB drives. keep the OS on the system and all the sensitive data on an external drive.
Raymond @ Sep 19th 2007 1:59AM
Isn't that practically impossible. Sure, you could put your sensitive documents on an external drive and have it encrypted but login data and passwords still stay along with the OS on the notebook's drive. Plus, its easier to steal/lose a portable hard drive than a laptop. And hardly anyone lugs around two bags for their notebook and external drive. They will most likely put them in the same laptop bag.
Grizz @ Sep 19th 2007 9:48AM
As awesome as Truecrypt is, its still not whole disk encryption. Its great for storing certain files, or snail mailing your databases.
But with the nature of windows, any file/document on the encrypted drive that is accessed might be cached on the unencrypted part of the drive.
Speed addict... @ Sep 19th 2007 11:30AM
Granted, it's not a whole disk encryption, but you can still encrypt the entire data partition (not the OS). As for lugging around stuff, I have a 16GB USB flash drive which hangs from my keys. It contains all my data, so that if my laptop is stolen, all they'll find is my Engadget browsing logs and some temp files. All the Office files I use stay on the flash drive. If you store your passwords on IE or Firefox, it's your fault :-)
cmdwedge @ Sep 19th 2007 2:12AM
Software full-disk encryption absolutely kills performance. I wonder if this hardware solution is any faster? Has Seagate released any '5400 vs 5400 w/encryption' speed tests?
Alexander @ Sep 19th 2007 7:52AM
It's really not that bad. We use PGP at work, and I would say that it only cuts 'performance' by about 10%. We are using old laptops too, so any newer computers should be hardly noticeable.
The initial encrypt takes ages though--but you can use the computer while it is encrypting. So, it's not so bad.
Matt B @ Sep 19th 2007 9:59AM
We have a couple of the hardware encrypted drives at work for testing. We have seen no overhead on the drives. They encrypt constantly. Even during an initial OS install. The only thing the software does for the drive is allow you to configure the authentication. They appear to be a good alternative to software whole disk encryption for any users who have issues with the overhead of software based encryption. We only have two drives, so I'm not sure how painful management will be long term.
Grizz @ Sep 19th 2007 9:51AM
I'm currently using the previous version on my D820. Given its a 7400rpm Vista still gives the same 5.0 score on the HDD with and without it enabled.
ziphem @ Sep 19th 2007 2:03PM
Lenovo is a "big" laptop player as well - they're #3.
"In the fourth quarter [of 2006], HP had the greatest market share with 17.4 percent, followed by Dell at 14.5 percent, Lenovo at 7.1 percent, Acer at 6.6 percent and Toshiba at 3.7 percent. Those numbers placed the companies in the same rankings they held in the third quarter of 2006.
The Thinkpad T61P has been offering Seagate "ST9160824AS" hard drives in its computers; the "ST9160824AS" is a 5400 FDE.2 model.
www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus_5400_fde.pdf
Joe Denison @ Dec 4th 2007 12:33AM
I did a benchmark before/after installing PGP WDE with HD Tach and I/O performance was reduced in excess of 65%. I'm curious what the difference would be between PGP WDE on a Seagate 7200 vs. a Seagate 5400 w/FDE.2 -- could the hardware solution be significantly faster? Anyone know of any benchmark testing on the Seagate drives as compared to software encryption? I get a measly 33MBps sustained read speed on my Dell D820 now with a 7200 drive w/PGP WDE 9.6.3 and I'm thinking there's gotta be a better solution.
Another issue I have with the Wave Software was that it appeared the max length of a password is 8 characters. That surely can't be right.
--
Joe