Further benefits of Opal on Solid State Drives

Posted by Ken Y-N on July 26th, 2010 at 04:26pm

A recent article by Thomas Coughlin for the Gerson Lehrman Group discussed a few reasons why the Trusted Computing Group’s Opal specification for self-encrypting drives is also applicable to solid state (Flash) drives. Two benefits that I hadn’t realised were available are 1) the cryptographic secure erasure feature of Opal, zapping the decryption keys in just a few milliseconds, is now recognised by the US government’s FIPS 140 revision 3 draft document as a permitted way of wiping drives, and 2) following on from 1), for Solid State Drives an ever-present worry is the wearing-out of the drive, but now since wiping the drive consists of just deleting a key, wear on the drive is minimised.

Tags: gerson lehrman group, opal, thomas coughlin

Under Storage Tags: gerson lehrman group, opal, thomas coughlin