ASI To Ship Whitebooks With Seagate Encrypted Drive

For VARs selling to highly security-conscious industries such as health care, law and government, ASI next month will ship new whitebook systems, marking the first notebook PCs to add Seagate's Momentus hard drives with built-in encryption.

Seagate's Momentus 5400 FDE.2, a 2.5-inch hard drive that adds hardware-based full disk encryption to protect data at the drive level instead of the OS level, is aimed to help businesses protect against unauthorized access to laptops and to comply with data privacy regulations.

ASI's new C8015 notebook (left) uses Wave Systems Embassy Security Center's Trusted Drive Manager, wizard-driven security management software aimed to ease setup and configuration of the drives. The software also lets IT administrators control hard drive security settings and taps Seagate's DriveTrust technology to allow administrators to erase data cryptographically for system redeployment or disposal.

With the new ASI system, end users authenticate themselves even before booting up the system. In addition to traditional password authentication, the notebooks also employ biometric fingerprint readers as well as the Trusted Platform Module support for local cryptographic key backup and archive. The drive also won't affect system performance -- one of the top complaints voiced about encryption software, said ASI.

Security features boost the notebook's price by about 25 percent over similar ASI models, bringing the cost to around $2,150. ASI also plans to integrate the drive into 13 different notebook models during the next several months.

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