Seagate Technology, the world’s largest maker of hard disk drives (HDDs), said that it had begun offering its clients the company’s new hard drives that can encrypt data on themselves thus providing advanced security to those, who require it at relatively low cost. But instead of shipping HDD with data encryption features for mobile personal computers (PCs), Seagate said it is currently offering appropriate hard drive for media center PCs.

Seagate calls its platform to enable secure hard disk drives as  DriveTrust technology and claims that it combines strong, fully automated hardware-based security with a programming foundation that makes it easy to add security-based software applications for organization-wide encryption key management, multi-factor user authentication and other capabilities that help lock down digital information at rest.

DriveTrust technology works by encasing the security operations in the hard drive, making the technology as easy and cost-effective to deploy as the drive itself. For users, only a password is needed to self-authenticate for full drive access, which greatly simplifies the ownership of a computer featuring the technology. The new hard drives carry a special chip that performs 128-bit AES encryption at the speed, which matches the bandwidth of HDD’s interface, e.g. Serial ATA 150Mb/s. Given that the chip is specially tailored for encryption operations, it provides higher energy efficiency compared to software-based approaches, which require the power of the central processing unit.

DriveTrust technology, according to Seagate, gives independent software vendors (ISVs) a platform for building stronger security applications. The DriveTrust technology software developer kit (SDK) includes the documentation and tools necessary to build DriveTrust technology-enabled applications such as access controls needed to manage encryption keys, passwords and other forms of authentication for large deployments.

Seagate currently offers DB35-series hard drives for digital video recorders (DVRs) and other digital entertainment devices featuring DriveTrust technology. The DB35-series hard drives are the first to enable manufacturers to lock a drive to the system, allowing service providers to deploy DVRs that protect recorded content from illicit copying and distribution if the 3.5” 7200rpm drive is removed. In Q1 2007 Seagate will also unveil Momentus FDE 5400.2 hard drives for laptops that features the DriveTrust technology.