Full Disk Encryption is ecologically sound
Posted by Ken Y-N on August 12th, 2008 at 02:56pm
On the Blogs and Files blog I found an interesting post discussing Full Disk Encryption (FDE) on hard drives.
First, Seagate’s FDE-supporting Cheetah 15K.6 drive, using specifications developed by the Storage Workgroup of the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), will be used in enterprise-targeted drive arrays, as FDE is becoming a requirement in certain markets. In addition, all other hard drive vendors are participating in the TCG work, so TCG standard-based FDE may soon be standard on most drives.
Next, the National Security Agency in the USA considers that for certain FDE drives, if the encryption keys are deleted then the contents are also considered deleted (or at least unrecoverable).
Putting the two points together, now rather than having to consign a drive to scrap, just deleting the key information should allow the drive to be reused.
With ecological issues coming more to the fore, this sounds like an excellent opportunity for the TCG to promote a most positive benefit! Read the full story here, and also a more detailed look, with comments from vendors, on the recycling issues at the Storage Architect blog.
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