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Seagate Momentus 5400.4 250GB Notebook Hard Drive  (Source: Image via Seagate)
Seagate announces a 3.5-inch 1TB hard drive with full disc AES encryption and a 250GB notebook hard drive

Seagate this week announced two new hard drives for desktops and notebook computers. The new desktop hard drive is a 1TB 3.5-inch internal drive with integrated government-grade encryption technology to keep data safe from unauthorized users. The drive is called the Barracuda FDE for full disk encryption and is the world’s first 3.5-inch desktop hard drive with native encryption and uses the same technology as the Momentus FDE notebook hard drives.

Seagate employs AES, which is the strongest level of commercially available encryption protocols. The Barracuda FDE encrypts the entire drive’s contents for full protection when the system is off. Booting a computer with a Baraccuda FDE drive requires the user to enter a pre-boot password. The Barracuda FDE desktop drive is available in capacities up to 1TB and has a 7200-rpm spindle speed.

Additionally, Seagate also introduced a new notebook drive -- the Momentus 5400.4. The new Momentus notebook drive uses a standard 2.5-inch form factor with a 5400-rpm spindle speed and packs a full 250GB of storage into a notebook-sized form factor. While this Seagate drive gives up storage capacity to the 320GB Toshiba notebook drive recently announced, the new 250GB is the largest notebook drive made by Seagate.

To reach this high level of storage, Seagate employs perpendicular magnetic recording technology it pioneered on the 750GB Barracuda hard drive last year. The Momentus 5400.4 also has improved durability with an operating shock tolerance of 325 Gs and a non-operating shock tolerance of 900 Gs.

The Momentus 5400.4 is scheduled to ship to system builders in the fourth quarter of 2007 and the Barracuda FDE is on track for shipment in 2008. Seagate has no comment on pricing of either drive at this time.

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Good stuff for business
By sapiens74 on 9/7/2007 5:12:24 PM , Rating: 1
Need this is mobile hard drive though




RE: Good stuff for business
By Homerboy on 9/7/07, Rating: 0
RE: Good stuff for business
By FITCamaro on 9/7/2007 6:04:06 PM , Rating: 2
Yes he did. And he's saying its all well and good but its needed in notebook drives since the problem for businesses isn't desktops walking off but laptops.


RE: Good stuff for business
By sapiens74 on 9/7/2007 6:13:22 PM , Rating: 2
Thanks Camero

You said it for me :)


RE: Good stuff for business
By Martin Blank on 9/7/2007 6:50:01 PM , Rating: 5
Seagate put on-drive FDE in mobile hard drives months ago with the Momentus line (which is linked to in the very first paragraph of TFA). You've been able to buy them for a while now, and they do ship in a few notebook brands.


RE: Good stuff for business
By Samus on 9/8/2007 6:47:39 PM , Rating: 2
I think the new drives have full disc encryption thats entirely in hardware. Previous drives I've used from Seagate needed a driver to be installed in the operating system along with software to adjust the settings. The new drives appear to function completely independant, possibly with their own BIOS before they boot to the OS.


RE: Good stuff for business
By Martin Blank on 9/9/2007 3:21:07 PM , Rating: 2
The article says that the new drives use the same technology as in the notebook drives.


RE: Good stuff for business
By mdogs444 on 9/7/2007 7:57:46 PM , Rating: 2
Exactly. I think this is great. I work IT for a hospital system with so much personal health data. We have to use software encryption on 2000+ laptops that require boot login before actual windows login. fail the user & pw twice, and it locks so the drive wont even spin up. but it takes up so much resources encrypting on the fly.

I hope these drives keep performance up while encrypting


RE: Good stuff for business
By FNG on 9/8/2007 1:03:24 AM , Rating: 2
One of the first major data losses of Veteran data was a stolen tape and in all reality drives like the 1TB work real well for backup to disk operations and could be taken offsite. That considered, these are a godsend for those of us who do disaster recovery planning because it is one less thing we have to buy (i.e. encryption software). With luck, the performance will near the non-encrypted siblings. Now all it has to do is get a NSA blessing.


RE: Good stuff for business
By rninneman on 9/8/2007 11:08:34 AM , Rating: 3
AES is the first publicly available encryption that has been approved for government use including Classified: Top Secret data. The US governemnt made AES its standard encryption in 2003. As of last year, the NSA had determined that AES was only vulnerable to side channel attacks.


RE: Good stuff for business
By Spivonious on 9/10/2007 3:24:36 PM , Rating: 2
They also announced a notebook drive.


Performance
By natebsi on 9/7/2007 6:15:33 PM , Rating: 2
"FDE provides the optimal balance of capacity, performance and security."

It will be very interesting indeed to see what kind of performance hit you get with encryption on. I would think it would be pretty significant.

I love the idea. This is something long overdue in hard drives, and I'm glad someone is taking the first step!




RE: Performance
By alusul on 9/8/2007 1:23:24 AM , Rating: 2
In this case though the performance hit should not affect CPU or memory usage unlike standard encryption methods, a boon for businesses with many levels of PC's in the field in which upgrading more than the hard drive may be beyond budget.


RE: Performance
By WackyDan on 9/8/2007 8:49:39 PM , Rating: 2
First of all... No perforamnce hit at all.

2nd.... You can't use these drives in older systems. They specifically require bios support - So you should check with your OEM to ensure they have a supporting bios.

3rd. You need to realize (for some of the comments up the thread), that there is still a PBA for the user to go through before getting to the Windows GINA. In a single user's case, that means entering the Hard Drive password that has been set via the bios - that is how access to the encrypted contents is controlled. Sound familiar? Not very secure if te end user writes that password down on a post it note as many do.

4th. TO achieve multifactor login and administrative management you need to add software. The software for the Seagates is all over the map right now and only fo rhte Seagates... You'll be better off waiting as every drive OEM is releasing encrypted drives, and there will be software that will work across all of them, not jus tthe Seagates.

FYI - In a managed environament, there are 4 admin keys and 4 user keys that can be set per drive.


RE: Performance
By Samus on 9/9/2007 12:44:26 PM , Rating: 2
Right, I would guess they have an onboard processor to handle encryption/decryption, much like a raid controller handles parity in hardware instead of offloading to the CPU.

And like hardware raid solutions, there is virtually no CPU overhead for the hosting PC, and negligible performance impact (in the case of RAID5, substantial performance improvements, but obviously encryption isn't going to speed anything up)

I would expect most other manufacturers to follow in Seagate's footsteps on this one, much like Perpendicular Recording.


RE: Performance
By emboss on 9/8/2007 5:16:29 AM , Rating: 5
quote:
It will be very interesting indeed to see what kind of performance hit you get with encryption on.


Probably exactly zero. Hardware AES implementations can reach 10+ gbit/sec speeds, and you can get IP cores that can function at similar speeds. An AES core integrated with the main controller chip could transparently encrypt/decrypt the data as as it passes over the SATA interface (at full SATA speeds) with no problem whatsoever and effectively zero delay.


Correction
By Nightskyre on 9/7/2007 5:09:06 PM , Rating: 1
To reach this high level of storage, Seagate emplys perpendicular magnetic recording technology it pioneered on the 750GB Barracuda hard drive last year.

Should be employs




RE: Correction
By Duwelon on 9/7/2007 7:57:36 PM , Rating: 1
One of my teachers used to have this peeve with the local newspaper here. He gave extra credit once a week if all you did was bring in an article of said newspaper where there was a grammatical error in it, which was virtually always because of words like this.


RE: Correction
By excrucio on 9/7/2007 8:55:58 PM , Rating: 2
Although writers do study or possibly read proof their material they are still humans. Errors all the time.

I my self have the tendency of eating words out, because i usually will be thinking of the word and will forget to write it in. =]

but this is just my opinion. Good stuff Seagate


RE: Correction
By wordsworm on 9/7/07, Rating: 0
RE: Correction
By Spivonious on 9/10/2007 3:28:55 PM , Rating: 2
"read proof" should be "proofread".

"Errors all the time" is not a sentence.

"my self" should be "myself".

"eating words out" - what does this mean?

On second thought, it appears English is not your first language, so take this post as being helpful rather than critical. :)


RE: Correction