Seagate on Monday announced it has teamed up with virus-protection software developer McAfee to develop its self-encrypting notebook PC hard drives from its Momentus Full Disk Encryption (FDE) line, in both 7200RPM and 5400RPM versions. Both are now available in 320GB capacities, or the highest of any FDE drive on the market, and Seagate promises to introduce even larger, 500GB versions soon.

The drives offer a SATA interface and have built-in, government-grade AES encryption. Seagate calls them the fastest self-encrypting hard drives in the industry. McAfee will join other security software providers in teaming up with Seagate to help protect the hardware maker's hard drives. The McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) management system and its endpoint encryption client are integrated into each new Seagate FDE HDD.

Seagate has ensured the drives can be easily installed by users, with the only extra step necessary compared to a traditional HDD involving entering a BIOS password. Seagate claims no boot-up delays or system shutdowns.

The Momentus 5400 FDE.3 drives are available now in 320GB and 160GB capacities and with an 8MB cache, while the 7200FDE HDDs come in the same capacities but with 16MB of cache. The 500GB versions of each drive are scheduled to ship early in 2009. No prices have been announced for any of the drives.