ASI to sell laptops with Seagate’s encrypted hard drive

By Janet Harris

ASI Computer Technologies of the US is to start selling laptops with Seagate Technology’s new Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drive, which features built-in encryption technology.

The computers, called ASI C8015, will be sold through a number of ASI’s partners, including Newegg.com, PowerNotebooks.com and ZipZoomfly.com and will be equipped with Seagate’s Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drive.

They will also feature a fingerprint reader, 15.4-inch display, Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile 2.0GHz processor, Nvidia graphics with 256MB memory, 1GB RAM and a DVD rewritable drive and will be priced at around $2,150.

The drives include Seagate’s new ‘DriveTrust’ encryption technology to safeguard data. The encrypting hard disk is an alternative to full-disk encryption software, such as products sold by PGP and PointSec Mobile Technologies.

The Momentus 5400 FDE.2 provides up to 160GB of capacity, a Serial ATA interface, and hardware-based Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption.