Seagate launches Cheetah HDD with self-encryption technology

“The data breaches widely reported in the media generally focus on stolen laptops and PCs, but people forget about the staggering amount of information leaving the data center daily,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business. “Equipment and systems with hard drives inside are continuously being retired, relocated or repaired and there’s often little thought given to properly disposing of the data they contain before they leave the data center. A recent investigation showed that 50% of the drives returned for servicing by customers contained readable sectors. If you assume that an average system’s lifecycle is three to five years that suggests that more than 50 thousand enterprise drives are leaving data centers daily worldwide. If only half of those hard drives are readable, that’s at least 2,500TB per day of exposed data available in the open market. The increasing flow of exposed sensitive data ought to be a serious concern to CIO’s everywhere.”

Compared to other encryption technologies, self-encryption within the hard drive brings significant performance, management, and security benefits for users. Since the encryption engine is in the drive’s controller ASIC, encryption is transparently fast and performance automatically scales with every drive added to a data center. Because there is no performance cost associated with encrypting more data, there is no need to make fine-grained decisions as to what data to protect – which can eliminate the need for data classification. Self-encryption requires no change to the OS, applications, or databases. Instantaneous Key-Erase technology, a standard on all Seagate FDE hard drives, facilitates quick and secure removal, whether for repurposing, returning for service, or disposal.