Seagate Cheetah self-encrypting drive

Posted by Ken Y-N on April 8th, 2008 at 01:09pm

With the RSA Conference in full swing at San Francisco, the security-related press releases are coming thick and fast. This time it is Seagate, with their new Cheetah series of self-encrypting hard drives.

This drive series has Full Disk Encryption (FDE), spins at 15,600 rpm, and is suited for mission-critical servers and storage arrays. It is available in 147 GB, 300 GB and 450 GB sizes in a 3.5 inch case, 1.6 million hours Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), and either Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces. And a five year warranty on top of all that for good measure.

Sherman Black, a senior vice president and general manager of Seagate Enterprise Comput Business says that a recent survey showed 50% of drives returned for service contained readable sectors. From that one could conclude that at least 2 petabytes (that’s 2,000,000,000,000,000 bytes!) are travelling around in an unprotected form.

Since self-encryption is embedded within the drive controller, everything is transparent and there is no performance hit as more drives are added, and no need to worry about performance tuning which files should be encrypted and which shouldn’t.

The drives also have Instantaneous Key-Erase, a technology that doesn’t seem to be explained anywhere on Seagate’s site, but one presumes it allows for the drive key to be instantly deleted in the event of something, perhaps hot-swapping or power-down.

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) marketing work group chair Brian Berger says that the technology has been built upon open standards from the TCG, and corporations deploying drives employing these standards may be protected from government fines, lost business, lost goodwill, and other problems resulting from lost or stolen insecure drives.

The original press release was published in a million and one places on the web, such as website Gear, if you want to learn the full details.

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