Native hard drive encryption: Coming soon to a notebook near you?

In March, Seagate, ASI Computer Technologies and Wave Systems announced they had created a notebook (the C8015) with native hard drive encryption. If the notebook is lost or stolen, no worries – the data is encrypted on the hard drive, and there's no way to access the data without the user's password (no back doors, recovery tools or services available to retrieve it).

A few weeks ago, Seagate sent me the C8015, which includes a 15.4-inch widescreen display, the Seagate Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drive (80GB), an Intel T7200 Core 2 processor, 1GB of DDR2 667 memory, an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics card with 256MB of video RAM, DVD-RW optical drive, and Intel 802.11abg wireless connectivity. This configuration, with Windows XP Pro, would cost about $2,150.

The 2.5-inch Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drive uses Seagate's DriveTrust technology, and the C8015 also comes with Wave System's Embassy Security Center Trusted Drive Manager software, which helps in configuration and setup of the encrypted drive, as well as provide password management and policy settings.

Seagate says the FDE technology and native hard drive encryption offers more advantages to companies over typical software encryption programs, mainly in the system performance, cost and "user friendly" arenas. Part of the problem with encrypting data through software has been a drag on system performance, and Seagate says performance is not affected with the encrypted hard drive.

Configuring the system to enable the hard drive encryption takes a matter of minutes – the software makes it clear that after selecting a password to access the system, that there's no back door, no recovery tool, and nowhere to send the drive for data recovery. If users lose or forget their password and an IT manager hasn't recorded it somewhere, there's no way to retrieve it.

Knowing this, the configuration process makes it crystal clear for users to back up the password onto a removable USB drive or other location (like a network drive or removable media), although we found it odd that the backed-up password would be in plaintext on the USB drive.

After configuring the official password for the system, a login screen appears before going into the Windows boot-up procedure. Even trying to use a bootable CD that bypasses Windows won't work here in terms of getting access to the drive – Seagate says that only 134MB of disk space is visible through this method.

One odd part – when we did some Windows updates (security patches, etc.) and then restarted the system, the system's login screen didn't appear – it went right back into Windows. Only when we shut down the notebook completely would we get sent back to the original login screen. While we assume most users are shutting down their systems from time to time, Windows resets (and possibly "standby" or "sleep mode") don't bring you back to the protected login area.

Another odd thing is trying to "secure" one of these notebooks for purchase. The notebook is currently only available from Powernotebooks.com, labeled as the Power Pro L815 (see here). With increased demand for native hard drive encryption, we hope that some major PC manufacturers will start offering their own models.

• Wireless / Mobile
• Momentus
• notebook
• Seagate
• Storage
• Wave Systems