Seagate Self Encrypting Drives (SED) – RSA 2011
February 14, 2011 – San Francisco, CA – at the RSA Conference, Seagate introduced their full line of enterprise class Self Encrypting Hard Disk Drives (SED) to accompany their laptop and desktop drives. All of these drive follow the Opal standards as presented by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG). These products are now available in both the 2.5″ and 3.5″ form factor and support both single platter and multi-platter drives.
The product family has been shipping for while and had now reached the 1M unit mark. The initial interface for these devices was PATA, and the drive now features 3Gb/s SATA interface and for legacy compatibility, 6Gb/s SAS. The extension of the product family will include 6Gb/s SATA. These increased data rates are supported by the on-board device electronics which performs the SERDES function for the data transfer as well as the full encrypt/decrypt of the data from the read heads. With the control logic and crypto logic on the drive itself and in the signal path there is no need for a processor level crypto. The custom logic engine allows the drive to interface a system as normal drives and have and all the data secured at the drive without any performance impact. The drives are available as 7200, 10K and 15K drives for the enterprise and 7200 rpm drives for the laptop.
Seagate Cheetah and Constellation SED drives
These new drives conform to the OPAL specification and the also FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certification. The drives support both BIOS level encryption and enterprise software control from over 10 ISVs. The solution does not impact either CPU performance nor backup methodologies, as the data streamed from the drive interface is un-encrypted, just the media itself is encrypted. These SED drives support phyisical security on the product for times of physical loss, removal and secure destruction. With software control, the authentication for use happens at boot up and can be remotely provisioned for use.
Future products will include SSDs, but for now the products feature up to 500GB in the 2.5″ laptop format, and up to 1TB on the 3.5″ enterprise format. To address the changing formfactor for new portable devices, the 2.5″ devices are now available in a low profile 7mm heigh single platter format vs the standard 9.5mm high drive.
PC
