Seagate announces larger, faster AES-packing Momentus hard drives

Today's corporate laptops tend to be bristling with security measures, able to uniquely identify your fingers and faces on top of whatever authentication measures your operating system offers. But, without some kind of encryption, the drives inside are left completely vulnerable to anyone with a screwdriver. Seagate has been combating that with its AES-packing Momentus Full Drive Encryption disks for years, finally updating the range with a suite of larger and faster models. The first is the Momentus 5400 FDE.3, a 5400RPM drive with 8MB of cache available in 160GB and 320GB sizes. There's also the Momentus 7200 FDE, coming in the same two capacities but with twice the cache and, predictably, spinning at 7200RPM. Seagate's promising 500GB flavors soon, all with onboard AES encryption that doesn't impact boot times or overall performance. Just don't forget that BIOS password, yeah?

[Danial @ Nov 10th 2008 10:50AM]

TrueCrypt has become standard issue for all laptops at my office, and it works quite well, but a built in solution that I can trust is always nice. Also, being able to start completely from scratch with encryption(as in installing the OS while the drive is encrypted) is nice. Also, complete platform independence is nice.

[TRAFFICBLOWS @ Nov 10th 2008 10:52AM]

Forget about BitFocker, too!

[pavlindrom @ Nov 10th 2008 10:57AM]

80GB is more than I need. Make one like that for me, please. 160GB will be too much.

[tom @ Nov 10th 2008 11:04AM]

Storage capacity are never too little ;-) Always get the highest capacity that you can afford

[Dorf @ Nov 10th 2008 12:20PM]

@tom,

True, but when we are buying a few thousand laptops at a time for the corporation spending all that extra $$ for a larger harddrive then is required really adds up.

[tom @ Nov 10th 2008 12:57PM]

@Dorf

What about running into storage issues during the laptop mid-life crisis? Would you ditch the old HD and buy new replacement or buy new laptops?

[pavlindrom @ Nov 10th 2008 1:27PM]

So, Windows - below 20GB
Programs - below 2GB for me,
Games - quit
Music - 10GB at max
Internet - 0GB
what else is there?

[Mark @ Nov 10th 2008 3:05PM]

Seagate CEO Watkins says: You forgot porn.

[pavlindrom @ Nov 10th 2008 3:42PM]

none of that. quit it before it eats my life.
porn, I found, is worse than cancer. it leaves people with a crooked view of life to live among us... and that is what I don't want

[loosely_coupled @ Nov 12th 2008 12:43AM]

@pavlindrom

Um, you can think what you want of Porn, but saying it is worth than cancer is an insult to survivors of and the families of those who have passed from cancer.

[Kurian @ Nov 10th 2008 11:26AM]

That etched disk platter is gonna ship with a lot of bad sectors...

[OneLove @ Nov 10th 2008 11:37AM]

yawn

[mithinco @ Nov 10th 2008 11:53AM]

The head has to pick the lock in order to decrypt the drive.

[Josh @ Nov 10th 2008 12:15PM]

umm... not SATA? Or did you guys just shows us a crappy picture? I didn't think anyone cared about large capacity ATA.

[Neal @ Nov 10th 2008 12:55PM]

The new drives are SATA, no clue why they put up an image of an old ATA drive.

[Murphy Mac @ Nov 10th 2008 12:19PM]

Is that a plastic flywheel??

[Unknown @ Nov 10th 2008 7:35PM]

does it give the keys to the nsa for easy decrypt?

[swherdman @ Nov 11th 2008 8:38PM]

Just Announced?

I already have 4 laptops here with them