Trying to keep the hard drive top, Seagate has now begun to offer the Secure Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option for its project line-up which comprises of the Savvio 15K.2, Savvio 10K.3, Constellation and Cheetah 15K.7 HDDs.

This move allows Seagate’s customers to prefer from a wide variety of drives that offer automatic data-at-rest security for their servers and storage systems.

“Self-Encrypting Drives are one of the easiest, most lucrative security measures companies can execute,” said Eric Ouellet, vice president at Gartner. “The use of SEDs provides businesses with complete data-at-rest protection against information breaches that can occur in drives and systems that have been repurposed, decommissioned, disposed of, sent for repair, misplaced or stolen. Because all disk media ultimately leaves a company’s control, the use of SEDs ensures that data is protected at these critical stages of a system’s life cycle.”

According to Seagate, the settlement brought by its SED hard drives are:

  • - Performance
- The encryption engine matches the full interface speed of the drive and thus drive performance does not suffer. And because each individual drive contains its own encryption engine, there is no bandwidth matter with scalability as your security and storage needs grow with more drives added to the system.

  • - Compatibility
- Drive-level full disk encryption (FDE) technology is supported by the security protocol developed by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), an organization consisting of membership of more than 50 participating companies, including all hard drive manufacturers.

  • - Manageability
- Transparent to end user and storage systems, SEDs scale linearly with no bottlenecks or single points of crash. The IT user does not need to escrow the encryption key to maintain data recoverability because the encryption key is held in the drive. This frees the storage administrator from having to plan and conduct this performance-throttling activity.

  • - Security
- SED technology delivers a new standard of security for data-at-rest encryption. Cipher text is never uncovered and the drive is locked and inaccessible to anyone without full authorization.