Fujitsu Adds Encryption to Laptop Hard Drives

Fujitsu America announced a series of hard disks for business notebooks with hardware-based disk encryption, reducing the security risk of lost computers.The 2.5" 7,200RPM drives implement AES-256 encryption in the BIOS during power on, so that the keys are not stored anywhere on the drive. According to Fujitsu, "the key...is not known even to the HDD when the system is powered off."

David James, Fujitsu's vice president of advanced product engineering, said, "There's an astonishing number of notebooks stolen every year," he said. "Over 700,000 of them. And only 1 percent get recovered."

"If a stolen machine is acquired by the evil organization of your choice, it could be attacked by almost unlimited resources," he continued. "But with 256-bit encryption, the data can't be unscrambled."ChannelWeb, CNET News