Seagate Provides New Hardware-Based Encryption Technology

By Brian Turner

Seagate’s new ‘DriveTrust Technology’, an effective means of preventing the theft of data from stolen or lost laptops, could become standard in a few years.

While most encryption technologies reside in a separate application or as part of the operating system, DriveTrust technology integrates encryption directly into the drive itself. Although the technology had been available for Seagate’s DV35 series hard drives for digital recorders, it has not previously been available in PC-based systems. The first Seagate laptop hard drive to include the technology will be the Momentus 5400 FDE.2.

The encryption keys for the drive are hidden in secure partitions to ensure that no other of the computer’s resources have access.

When the computer is booted-up, the password-based system prompts the user to unlock the drive. An administrator may add other security-based applications to the drive, including organisation-wide encryption key management or multi-factor authentication.

A disadvantage of the system is that if a disk becomes damaged, encryption can complicate the recovery process by adding another layer of complexity.