Hard disks now encrypt themselves
 

ONE OF THE more interesting things I heard about at IDF was a new tech from Seagate called DriveTrust.

Imagine digital encryption for drives that works independently of the computer, basically the drive does it all at (presumably) drive speed. This has several advantages over software and computer based schemes, and a few downsides.

First off, everything is stored on the drive, and it is transparent. You put it in a computer, set a password, and forget it. While the press release does not say how you can boot off an encrypted volume that the BIOS does not 'need' to be aware of, one assumes this is possible. My guess it that it can selectively encrypt volumes and files. Theoretically it is painless.