Seagate has announced another world's first in its hard drive product line. The Cheetah 15K.6 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) is the world's first to feature self-encrypting technology.

Aimed at mission critical servers and storage arrays, the Cheetah 15K.6 FDE data encryption technology encrypts the data no matter where the drive is used, moved, stored or retired, something that enterprise customers have been after for a long time; enterprise customers need to keep data secured throughout the hard drive's life span and now with the Cheetah 15K.6 this at last possible.

Using an ASIC controller, the encryption is transparent without any hit in the performance of the drive, and because the encryption technology is on the drive itself there are no changes needed in either applications or OS.

The Cheetah 15K.6 FDE hard drives will be available in 450GB, 300GB and 147GB capacities with either SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) or FC (Fibre Channel) interfaces and all come with a five-year warranty. Seagate will start shipping drives to OEM customers this quarter.