Seagate ships enterprise hard drives with self-encryption

Dong Ngo | Sep 23, 2009

(Credit: Seagate)

Seagate has been busy at work. A day after it started shipping the first SATA 6Gbps hard drive, it is now shipping enterprise hard drives with self-encrypting features.

The hard drive maker announced Tuesday the worldwide availability of the Seagate Secure Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option across its portfolio of enterprise-class hard drives. The products that come with this option include the Savvio (both the 15K.2 and 10K.3 versions), Constellation, and Cheetah 15K.7 drives.

According to Seagate, these enterprise-class products are the company's first-to-market drives with the SED technology, designed to deliver transparent security features for servers and high-end storage systems.

The SED technology offers complete data protection against information breaches that can occur in drives and systems that have been repurposed, decommissioned, disposed of, sent for repair, misplaced, or stolen. As an example of how easy date exposure takes place, Seagate revealed that 90 percent of hard drives returned for warranty purposes still contain readable data. This will not be the case with those that have SED, on which the data would not be readable without proper credentials.

According to Seagate, other than the security, the Seagate SED's encryption engine matches the full interface speed of the drive and therefore drive performance does not suffer when the encryption is turned on. The company's disk encryption technology is also supported by the security protocol developed through the Trusted Computing Group (TCG). This means it is compatible with a wide range of devices and major storage system providers.

These new self-encrypting drives are available only to Seagate's enterprise clients. It's unclear how much they cost.

Via CNET Crave

Filed under: PC & Peripherals
Leave a comment | Bookmark | Share