Up until now, hard drive makers have largely used their own proprietary methods to enable full drive encryption (FDE) on their products, making things potentially confusing for consumers. When FDE is enabled all data on a drive is encrypted and the computer requires a password before it will boot. Final specifications for a standardised method for full drive encryption were published this week by the Trusted Computing Group, which means that products from member companies will now follow the standard. Those companies include Fujitsu, Hitachi GST, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, Western Digital, Wave Systems, LSI Corp., ULink Technology, and IBM. With a single encryption standard and the fact that encrypting a drive now has a negligible effect on read and write speeds, it is more likely that encryption will eventually be adopted for any drive (be it HDD or SSD). Hitachi, Seagate and Fujitsu already produce drives which support the TCG standard.