Seagate is hoping to tap into increasing business fears over data theft by launching the first PC hard drive with ‘government-grade’ encryption technology.

The 1TB Barracuda FDE (full disc encryption) hard drive is being touted as the world’s first 3.5in desktop PC drive with native encryption, to prevent data theft from lost or stolen hard drives or systems.

The 7,200rpm drive comes with Advanced Encryption System (AES) technology, used by the US government and businesses worldwide, and is the strongest commercially available encryption technology.

Seagate said that the FDE drive delivers ‘endpoint security’ for powered-down systems as logging back on requires a pre-boot user password that can be backed up with additional security technologies such as biometrics and smart cards. It uses the same DriveTrust technology used in Seagate’s Momentus 5400 FDE.2 encrypted notebook hard drive.

“Data security has traditionally focused on preventing spoofing, sniffing, eavesdropping, denial-of-service and other threats to data traversing corporate networks and the Internet,” said Tom Major, Seagate vice president of personal computer business.

“Now that these networks have been hardened and are much more resistant to attack, computer thugs are increasingly targeting the place where data lives - on the hard drive. Seagate is answering this threat with the strongest security available for desktop PC information.”

Seagate also launched a new 250GB notebook drive , the Momentus 5400.4, based on perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology and sporting the fastest Serial ATA interface, offering speeds of up to 3Gbits/sec.