The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. federal agency focused on promoting product innovation by establishing technical standards for government and business, has certified the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption chip built into Seagate's Momentus 5400 FDE.2 disc drive.

The company stated Momentus 5400 FDE.2 is the world's first laptop hard drive with native encryption to protect against unauthorized access to information stored on lost or stolen laptop computers.

With the certification, Seagate becomes the first hard drive maker to offer a disc drive with built-in encryption approved by NIST. AES, an encryption standard developed by the U.S. government and used worldwide, has an expected useful life of more than 50 years. The algorithm is integral to Momentus 5400 FDE.2, a 2.5-inch hard drive built with Seagate DriveTrust technology. DriveTrust is a security platform that combines automated hardware-based security with a programming foundation that makes it easy to add security-based software applications for organization-wide encryption key management, multi-factor user authentication and other capabilities that help lock down digital information at rest.

The Seagate Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (Full Disc Encryption) hard drive uses AES to encrypt all hard drive information transparently and automatically. The hard drive also gives organizations an easy, cost-effective way to repurpose or retire laptops without compromising sensitive information and to comply with the growing number of data privacy laws calling for the protection of consumer information using government-grade encryption.