Samsung announced that it is shipping its first self-encrypting solid-state disk (SSD) drives. Dell promptly introduced a suite of mobile data security technologies for its Latitude line of laptops, with Samsung's native drive encryption expected to be available in the next few months.

Dell's press release told us that the drive, which is designed to deliver some of the fastest encrypted storage available, offers customers eight and a half times the shock tolerance versus standard notebook hard drives.

We have seen full disk encryption as a standard feature on some desktop and laptop hard disk drives, including Seagate's Momentus 5400 FDE.2 laptop drive. However Samsung claims its SSD is the first to come with FDE. The new drives come in 256GB, 128GB and 64GB capacities. They use AES encryption along with management software from Wave Systems Corp.

Dell said the Samsung drives add to the company's encryption technologies, which can be managed remotely with the Wave Embassy Server.