Seagate's 2.5-inch 5,400 rpm hard drive can hold 160 GB and uses just 2 watts of power for normal seek operations -- a true mobile hard drive. But the inclusion of full-time, whole-disk AES encryption turns the Momentus into something special. Mobile data can now be protected at full SATA interface speed with a single user password. Judges were unanimously impressed, with one judge noting, "This is a good approach to solving one of the most pressing problems in IT, encrypting laptop data." The implications of this security innovation are significant. Mobile employees can now carry ever-greater volumes of corporate data without the fear of loss or "forgetting" to run a time-consuming independent full-disk encryption tool.

Seagate's technology keeps the disk secure and eases end-of-life concerns. While judges liked the 5400 FDE.2, key management emerged as a potential concern. Hashed passwords are stored on the drive, and an emergency password recovery file can be kept on a separate device, so the security and integrity of encryption passwords has yet to be determined. Still, Seagate's Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drive represents one viable answer to perplexing storage security problems, and is easily worthy of this year's gold award for disk and disk subsystems.