Hatachi Travelstar 500GB, anyone have a hardware encription option model???

My Acer notebook does not have any great secrets or personal information on it but it just appeals to me to have a computer that if it was stolen the data would be usless and unavailable to anyone. Hatachi makes a big deal that this model has a hardware data encription otpion available. Just try and find this option on any available Hatachi notebook disk. I could not. Does anyone have this option and if so how does it work and how do you like it?

 

or, checkout and use truecrypt.

for all of the noise drive makers are spewing about in-drive hardware encryption, I've never seen one of them for sale. doesn't mean they don't exist, but in a sales channel available to the Average Joe, nope.

problem with whole drive encryption and end-users is the end-user. people forget their keys/passwords all of the time and end up choosing things like their dogs name or write the keys down on post-it notes.

but it you're up for the simple work of keeping your password/keys committed to memory, implement truecrypt on your portable machines. I have it on all of my machines and external drives. I have even figured out how to use it on virtual machines VHD files that I run on other peoples hardware.

Done simply and right, WDE is one less thing to worry about. Done sloppily, it can be a nightmare.

 

well, I was going to flex my security muscles here and discuss WDE, but newsposter pretty much took all the thunder I would have used.

Just remember that any form of cryptanalysis is based on a work-effort factor. The longer it takes for someone to crack a password or encryption method, the less likely they are going to attempt to do so.

Unless you've got state secrets on that machine, the average person who would try to get past your security isn't going to spend tons of time on it. There are too many other people out there with no protection whatsoever for them to waste the time on you (i.e., most criminals go after the lowest hanging fruit).