Storage giant Seagate has unveiled a range of new drives and products focusing on data security and increased capacity to meet the worldwide demand for digital content.

"The explosive growth in digital devices, applications and content is breathtaking, and much of that growth is driven by consumers as the home outpaces business in terms of storage," said Bill Watkins, chief executive of Seagate.

Among the nine new products is the first 1TB hard drive with full disc encryption added at a chip level on the drive's controller board, offering full 128-bit AES encryption at a base hardware level.

The Barracuda FDE (full disc encryption) is a 3.5in, 7,200-rpm hard drive that automatically and transparently encrypts all desktop PC information with the government-grade AES security protocol.

"Data security has traditionally focused on preventing spoofing, sniffing, eavesdropping, denial-of-service and other threats to data traversing corporate networks and the internet," said Tom Major, vice president of personal computer business at Seagate.

"Now that these networks have been hardened and are much more resistant to attack, computer thugs are increasingly targeting the place where data lives - on the hard drive."

Seagate also announced a range of Maxtor branded external drives that provide automatic backup, encryption and a full system restore option, including installed applications and operating system.

The new Cheetah 15K.6 hard drive was also unveiled as the highest-performance hard drive ever in a 3.5in form factor.

It offers a 28 per cent increase in sustained data transfer rates compared to previous generation drives and is available in capacities of 147GB, 300GB and 450GB.

The company has also increased the capacity of its Dave (Digital Audio Video Experience) platform, designed to stream data wirelessly to mobile devices to up to 60GB, and up to 1TB for its DB35 Series hard drives for DVRs and home media centres and the SV35 Series digital video surveillance hard drive.

The majority of the new range of drives will be available by the end of the year or early 2008.