Laptop Hard Drive With On-Board Encryption Is A First Say Seagate

An Ontario company will be the first to sell laptop computers using hard drives with built-in encryption technology.

ASI Computer Technologies of Markham, Ontario, Canada, will use hard drives that include a chip that automatically encrypts all data written to them on the fly, rendering it unreadable without a digital key or password.

The Momentus 5400 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) hard drive also allows all data stored on it to be instantly erased, Seagate said.

It is thought that this kind of hard drive will become a standard issue on corporate laptops.

Microsoft offer hard drive encryption through a feature called BitLocker in the latest version of its operating system, Vista, but it is only available in the software's enterprise and top-end Ultimate consumer versions.