Seagate’s Full Disk Encryption (FDE) hard drive

I remember this announcement back in 2005, when Seagate first announced that they would release a hard drive with full disk encryption (FDE). Well, they now have the Momentus FDE line of notebook drives (5400RPM) with 192-bit Triple-DES encryption, and it will be part of ASI’s $2,150 laptop. The 2.5″ drive is aimed at corporate users and managers who need to deal with storing sensitive data on laptops. The product specs are here. Hardware encryption is definitely the way to go for FDE, since using software to encrypt every read/write operation would be way too slow even on a modern CPU. Seagate claims that with their on-board encryption, it only takes up 1~2% of the CPU resources. I wonder how well the VIA chips with AES built-in would handle the encryption. It would make an interesting benchmark…

One of my first questions is: “What happens when the user loses his/her password?”. We all know that at some point, some person will lose his or her password. According to this article, there can be up to 4 master keys, and up to 4 user keys. So, if a sales rep quits unexpectedly, the sales manager can still use the master key to recover data on the laptop. Seagate also suggests it is possible to remotely manage the hard drive, to configure its user accounts and such. I hope administrators remember to NOT send their admin password for the hard drive in clear text over the Internet…

All in all, it looks like Seagate has brought to market a good product with the Momentus FDE line of drives. It has some good applications for corporations and government types as well.

Josh Kuo

Co-Owner of q!Bang Solutions

Mar 12, 2007