The number of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) who are releasing devices with full disk encryption (FDE) as a security measure is increasing, according to industry sources. On Monday, a partnership has been announced between Seagate and Dell to manufacture hard disks with FDE cryptoprocessor chips. A similar announcement will be made later this week independently by Hitachi, as well as by a third drive manufacturer.

FDE drives essentially do the same thing as software-based encryption solutions such as Bitlocker, but since they use an on-board cryptographic chip, such information such as a drive’s MBR can be encrypted as well. This is not possible with a software encryption method, FDE thus being more secure.

Both of the cryptographic solutions are used to prevent data on one’s drive from being seen by someone who isn’t privy to the encryption key. FDE, additionally, is designed for instances where sensitive information is contained on a notebook computer, which is lost or stolen; it is a handy function to have as according to a 2007 FBI study, a laptop is stolen in the U.S. roughly once every 52 seconds, and almost none of them are ever recovered.

Come Monday, Hitachi spokeswoman said that the company has not yet decided to formally announce their new drive. Seagate on the other hand, has announced that it has begun shipping on the first 320 GB and 500 GB FDE 2.5 inch Momentus drives for notebooks. The drives are available in either 5,400 or 7,200 RPM variants, and are to be found on a range of Dell Latitude notebooks, Precision mobile workstations, and one Optiplex desktop. They will be managed either locally through BIOS, or at an extra charge remotely through McAfee’s management console.

There’s currently no word on whether Toshiba is planning to launch an FDE drive, although Toshiba has teamed up in August with Wave Systems, whose hardware can be found in most laptops in the form of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips. TPMs are another form of cryptoprocessor which associate a hard disk to a motherboard and make the drive’s data irretrievable if used on another computer.

The first 150GB FDE drives were launched by Seagate a year and a half ago.

In good news for hardware boffins, Seagate is releasing a standalone FDE unit in addition to the OEM version, so that enthusiasts can upgrade their drives themselves.

Seagate and McAfee both use FIPS-197 government-grade encryption algorithms in their products that have received NSA certification. Seagate’s drive uses a dedicated chip, while McAfee uses a CPU-based software solution. The former has a major speed advantage, as the encryption runs at the rate of the drive itself, drastically cutting the time needed to encrypt a new drive.