Scotts Valley, California-based hard drives manufacturer Seagate said Monday it has begun shipping its Momentus 5400 2.5-inch notebook PC hard drive with built-in encryption to ASI Computer Technologies, a California-based notebook PC manufacturer. The notebook PC manufacturer will offer the drive in its new ASI C8015 whitebook system. The notebook is expected to be available in April, and will feature a biometric fingerprint reader for stronger user authentication.

ASI will target healthcare, legal, finance, government and other industries requiring strong protection of information stored on laptop PCs.

Strong laptop data security is increasingly important as the adoption of notebook PCs continues to soar and more notebooks are used to store sensitive personal and business information.

Lost or stolen notebook PCs can cost companies millions of dollars in compromised trade secrets and intellectual property and threaten consumers with the high cost of identify theft, yet many laptops remain unprotected.

A recent Ponemon Institute study found that 35% of all computer data breaches involved lost laptops or other digital devices. In the institute’s 2005 National Encryption Survey, the chief reasons organizations cited for not encrypting sensitive or confidential information were concern about system performance (69%), complexity (44%) and cost (25%).

Seagate’s Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (Full Disc Encryption) hard drive features perpendicular recording technology to deliver up to 160GB of capacity, a fast Serial ATA interface, and hardware-based AES encryption, a government-grade security protocol used to encrypt all hard drive information transparently and automatically, preventing unauthorized access to data on lost or stolen laptops.

The encrypting hard drive also gives organizations an easy way to repurpose or retire laptops without compromising sensitive information and to comply with the growing number of data privacy laws calling for the protection of consumer information using government-grade encryption.

The ASI notebook PC will also feature Wave Systems Embassy Security Center’s Trusted Drive Manager, software that simplifies setup and configuration of Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drives. Trusted Drive Manager also makes it easy for administrators and users to create and back up passwords, and for administrators to control hard drive policies and security settings.

The software also leverages Seagate’s DriveTrust Technology to allow administrators to instantly and easily erase all data cryptographically so the drive can be safely redeployed or discarded.

Seagate DriveTrust Technology is a powerful new security platform that combines strong, fully automated hardware-based security with a programming foundation that makes it easy to add security-based software applications for organization-wide encryption key management, multi-factor user authentication and other capabilities that help lock down digital information at rest.

“Momentus 5400 FDE.2 provides an easy, cost-effective way to prevent unauthorized access to all notebook PC data, not just selected files or partitions, in case the system or disc drive is lost, stolen, retired or resold. The 5,400-RPM drive’s hardware-based full disc encryption delivers significantly stronger protection against hacking and tampering than traditional encryption approaches by securely performing all cryptographic operations and key management within the drive.” said Seagate.