Scotts Valley (CA) - Seagate today said it has begun shipping its first hard drives equipped with a trusted platform module (TPM) and DriveTrust technology. The drives aim to increase data security, making it much more difficult for unauthorized users to access data on computers.

Seagate’s first customer to offer notebooks with the Momentus 5400.2 FDE drive is ASI, which will be offering the hard drives in its notebook models C8015 and C8015+. According to Seagate, the Momentus drive encrypts data automatically with AES 128-bit keys and allows access to stored content only through pre-boot authentication.

In a related announcement, Wave Systems said it has begun offering DriveTrust software for the new Seagate hard drive. The "Embassy Trust Suite" is marketed as "comprehensive security suite" and includes trusted client applications as well as remote IT management ; The "Embassy Security Center" provides TPM-based password vaults and key and password management ; the "Embassy Drive Manager" enables IT managers to manage FDE drives and enables "advanced DriveTrust" features. For example there are user level passwords that will unlock only the contents of the drive, while administrator level passwords enable access to features such as to securely wipe the data from the FDE drive in a single step.

Wave representatives said that the features of the FDE drive and the DriveTrust software can serve as a "get out of jail free" card, as critical data is kept secure, even if a notebook gets lost or is stolen.