Protecting data has always been important, but over the past year the general public and most any business have become security-conscious. Self–Encrypting Drives (SEDs) have been on the market for years, but very few people actually fully utilize these drives. Like the name implies, a self-encrypting drive uses an encryption engine built into the SSD’s controller to encrypt every file stored on the drive. This hardware-based encryption method offers a high level of data security, is invisible to the user, cannot be turned off and does not impact performance.

An SED is a life saver for many businesses as software encryption solutions can take hours to enable and all future data written to the drive will need CPU horsepower to do the encryption. This impacts system performance and is the least desirable and secure method for encryption. Since an SED SSD is already encrypting all its content, securing the drive might be as easy as enabling a password for the drive. By setting an ‘ATA password’ in your systems UEFI/BIOS you can easily secure a SATA SSD. The only kicker is that only a handful of modern desktop boards still have the option for an ATA password to be set, but it is still fairly common on laptops and business PCs. If your motherboard doesn’t support an ATA password you can use a third party utility like McAfee Endpoint Protection for PC, WinMagic SecureDoc or Wave Embassy Trust Suite to secure the drive.