Seagate Ships World's Most Secure Hard Drive

An anonymous reader writes to let us know that after two years Seagate is finally shipping its full-disk encryption product, and you can get your hands on it in a laptop from system vendor ASI.

Comments

Oh Goody!

[LibertineR]

According to Seagate, any US company that loses a laptop using the Seagate drive in conjunction with the launch security management system from Wave Systems, will not have to give public notification of the loss, even if the data is of a highly confidential nature. This alone guarantees that the technology will find a market given the increasingly costly and embarrassing repercussions of laptop thefts.

Who cares if this gets cracked by Tuesday, bitches?

The selling point is that the banks wont have to tell you when Bubba leaves his laptop on the CAL TRAIN with your credit card data in standby mode, cause its encrypted!

I feel so safe!

Re:3gb/s sata on a 5400 rpm drive?

[MightyYar]

Wild speculation here, but it could be one or more of the following:

• They sell a lot of drives with a lot of different speeds. It might be cheaper for them to standardize on a few chipsets then to buy different chips and have different designs based on the drive's capability.
• For marketing reasons, they may have decided to always have the latest-and-greatest buzzword on the box of all of their new products.
• A major customer asked them to use this interface.

In all, not the strangest decision I've come upon today.

No need to blame the user.

[twitter]

worlds stupidest user with passwords like 'password' :-)

That's a joke, but some people really think that way. Blaming "stupid users" makes them feel more secure or helps them pass the buck for choosing systems with poor security. When you think about it, it's not very funny.

Passive encryption might be a step in the right direction, but I won't trust it as long as the software doing has owners and secrets kept from users. They can point to specs and tell me what they are doing, but that does not mean they are doing that. The owners can break in at will, the keys can be padded with zeros and finally, the owners can make mistakes.