Today has been a shining moment for Seagate Technology as it announced a barrage of products including its version of a hybrid hard disk drive for notebooks which Microsoft's upcoming Vista operating system will utilize with certain technologies. We reported on another technology regarding hard disk security a while back and Seagate has finally officially announced its Momentus 5400 FDE hard disk drive.

The Momentus 5400 FDE, or Full Disk Encryption, drive is a 2.5-inch notebook drive which packs in a hardware encryption algorithm for on-the-fly protection of data without any user intervention during the reading and writing process.

FDE works like this: The drive is packaged and ready to allow the user to enter a password, or up to 5 if used by multiple users, which allows access to the disk in a laptop. The user will only need to enter the password once during the boot process to "open" the disk's contents. From that point on encryption is seemless and completely transparent.

Among the features are:

• Highest level of data protection (AES 128-bit encryption) for data at rest
• Encryption speed that matches the throughput of the drive interface to preserve system performance
• Superior system performance and battery life to software-based disc encryption
• Quick erase, or scrubbing, of drives that are repurposed or retired
• Preboot authentication gives users secure access to their notebook data
• Full Trusted Platform Module (TPM) support for local cryptographic key backup and archive, providing key management capabilities for individual users to large organizations

Additional information can be found on the Momentus 5400 FDE product sheet (PDF).

During our interview with Momentus FDE's Product Marketing Manager, Joni Clark, we picked up a handful of interesting details including the fact that there may be support for 3rd party software to allow greater flexibility and additional capabilities regarding the security features of the Momentus FDE technology. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.