Analysis

posted on 24 July 2008 07:34

UK storage expert Chris Evans has unearthed full disk encryption (FDE) information from Seagate and Hitachi GST which indicates that FDE could become a staple enterprise hard drive requirement in some markets.

Seagate said its OEMS are developing enterprise systems (drive arrays) using its FDE Cheetah 15K.6 drive. IBM and LSI have said they will deploy FDE drives in some array products. The FDE Seagate uses is compliant with the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) disk encryption specification (presentation downloadable below). Hitachi GST has announced a FDE drive. All hard drive vendors are taking part in the Trusted Computing Group's work. It's expected that all encrypting hard drives will interoperate with a separate key management function.

The US NSA treats a Seagate Momentus FDE hard drive as having had its contents deleted if the encryption keys are deleted.

A Hitachi GST representative said: "We have already supported bulk encryption feature for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch (drive products) and will support it to Enterprise product next year. ...  We have been very actively involved in the activities of TCG and plan to pick up security feature based on TCG standards which will be implemented from next year. The security market is still small but it has been growing steadily due to the data security concern and also as a fast and cheap solution for repurposing of drives in Server applications or disposal of failed drives."

Chris Evans goes into the green implications of this in terms of the energy needed to dispose of hard drives.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}

Download file: Trusted Computing Group storage security presentation June 2007.pdf