HDD Encryption, the Seagate Way
Just when we thought it appropriate to make the leap for SSDs, pop goes Seagare with another improvement for the good ol’ HDDs. We might as well stick with HDDs for now because they still have the upper ground as far as prices are concerned.
Seagate seems to be hard at work to keep the HDDs alive as much as possible. Accordingly, they announced the brand new addition to the Cheetah hard drive family with the release of the first self-encrypting hard drive technology targeted at servers and storage arrays. OK, so these might not be for everyday PC users, but a marketing ploy to keep SDDs at bay. The latest addition is codenamed Cheetah 15K.6 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) and it offers full data encryption technology that encodes the data no matter where the drive is used, moved, stored or retired.
Now why would we need encryption in our PCs? Vista provides some encrypting stuff there, who needs hardware encryption? Yeah right, Vista… Seagate is aiming at delivering the tools that enterprise customers have needed for a long time. Namely, the enterprise people always get paranoid over the security of their stored data and they really need to keep those bits of info secured for the entire HDD life span.
Getting deeper into the hard coding technology, we find out that Cheetah 15K.6 uses an ASIC controller to handle the encryption of the drive transparently and there is no performance cost associated with the drive. Best of all, the encryption schemes are embedded on the hard drive so you needn’t change applications or the OS.
The Cheetah 15K.6 FDE lineup will soon be available in 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB sizes using the SAS or FC interfaces. Nothing on prices but these should hit your wallet a little harder than expected.
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