Vendors take giant leap with drive encryption: "Now that the capacities of laptops and other portable device drives have hit hundreds of gigabytes, just about any corporate database can easily fit on a laptop. That affordable capacity gives users the opportunity to work outside the office on projects with large data footprints. But it also can expose your company to liability if a storage device holding classified data falls into the wrong hands.

Encryption seems to be the obvious way to prevent data leaks, but because software encryption tools add some delay and some complexity, that option hasn't gained much popularity with users.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Seagate Technology LLC recently started to offer 2.5-in. disk drives with native, hardware-based, full-disk encryption. These technologies offer companies another option for laptop data protection that promises to be reliable and easy to implement -- without the performance slowdowns you get from software tools.

In March, Seagate announced its line of Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drives, with capacities ranging from 80GB to 160GB. More recently, Hitachi GST (Global Storage Technologies) countered, offering the factory-activated Bulk Data Encryption option on all Travelstar drives with both 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm.

Despite their differences, these drives have in common a set-and-forget encryption capability: After you activate encryption, all content will be automatically encoded with a strong cipher.

It's worth noting that activating encryption also adds a boot-level password that will keep prying eyes from reaching your data, even if the drive is transferred to a different machine. Should you change your mind and decide, for example, that the drive has to be redeployed to a different user, you can deactivate encryption at any time.

There is an additional benefit to having full drive encryption: quick obliteration. Throw away the encryption key and all data becomes inaccessible."

(Read Original Article - Via computerworld .)