While it is not a problem for tech savvy users like you and me to encrypt a disk drive with encryption software, it may very well be one for normal computer users.

But even with encryption there is the chance that third parties may find ways to access the data on the hard drive, for instance by brute forcing the password or placing a trojan or other malicious code on a system.

Toshiba recently announced a new generation of self-encrypting drives with several advanced features that offer more than hardware data encryption.

The drives can be configured to only work on known host systems. Any attempt to connect them to an unknown host would automatically render the data on the drives useless.

The drives have been specifically designed to “address the increasing need for IT departments to comply with privacy laws and regulations governing data security” and are “ideally suited for PC, copier and multi-function printer, and point of sale systems used in government, financial, medial or similar environments”.

Drives can be configured to deny access or erase sensitive data if the authentication process fails. This would for instance be the case if someone connected the hard drive to an unauthorized computer system.

The hard drives will be offered with capacities between 160 Gigabytes and 640 Gigabytes, 7200 RPM, 16 Megabyte buffer and a Serial ATA 3,0 Gbps interface. All drives use the AES 256 encryption algorithm to protect data from unauthorized access.

The drives will be made available in the coming months, and will be first made available to OEMs and ISVs. The press release is available here.

Figures for the first quarter of 2008 have just been released and Blu-Ray standalone player sales dropped by 40% between January and February and rose by only 2% in March. Analysts had predicted that the winning format would see a strong surge in hardware sales but this is not happening.

The price of the Blu-Ray player cannot possibly be the reason for the sharp drop. The players were as expensive when Blu-Ray was still competing with HD-DVD and the prices have not changed a lot since then. One possible reason could be that the customers who wanted to purchase a Blu-Ray player have already done so and that the others simply do not want to pay that much money for a movie player.

Add to that the Internet update problematic and horror stories that some early Blu-Ray players will not be able to play new movies because of technology updates and you pretty much got it summed up.

Would not it be funny if no format would win the war ? That Blu-Ray would not win either because most consumers don’t need it ? That another company would come up with a better format, without DRM, for a lesser price ? I would love to see that. How about you ?

I’m not a huge fan of Sony and have still hopes but it looks pretty sad for the HD DVD supporters. Those consumers who have bought a HD DVD player will face a huge problem much like the Betamax users faced back in the days when VHS did win that race. It occured to me that the consumer is always loosing in this kind of wars.

If you pick the wrong player you will have to purchase another one to be able to view high definition videos, if you pick the right player you contributed to a monopoly, and it’s Sony this time – it will be awful, it’s a Sony after all.

This is why experts suggest to either overwrite the hard drive with random data before formatting it or running tools like Eraser to erase all data on the hard drive.

The HDD Low Level Format Tool will low level format a hard drive erasing the whole disk surface in the process which has the result, that it is impossible to restore data afterwards. It supports SATA, IDE, SCSI, USB, FIREWIRE and Big drives (LBA-48) and the most popular manufacturers Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum and Western Digital.

I did not try that hard drive software yet because I do not have a spare hard drive lying around that I could use to test it with and I did not want to format one of my hard drives just for the sake of testing it. If any of you do test the software let me know about the results please. Running a recovery tool like Recuva after formatting the hard drive should show us if the data is really not recoverable.

To be honest; I do not care if that is the end, if the war will go on another decade or if everyone will come to their senses and produce one format for all movies. I can understand that companies want to push a format that they have created. What I can’t understand is that movie companies like Warner did not pressure the format creators to create one format which would be the best for the customers.

Now we have two formats and everything seems to be utterly complicated. Playstation 3 owners want Blu-Ray to win, the guys who bought a HD-DVD drive for their Xbox 360 want that format to win and everyone can’t play movies that are released exclusively for the other format.

It’s all about money of course and the company whose format is going to win will make most of it for a long time to come. Do they care about the viewers, the customers ? I don’t think so. Besides the obvious fact that many customers who already bought a new player will not be able to view all movies they are also confusing everyone who has not made a decision yet.

My opinion is that we will see players who are supporting both formats. They will cost more but are in my opinion the only reasonable way to please those who buy the players. I for one will use DVD as long as possible and boycott this insane war. I would change my mind if they would release a player that is fast, without all the copy protection and DRM and play both formats without problems. This will never happen I know but hope is still there.