Development of World’s First Self-Encrypting Drives by Toshiba
This may come as a sigh of relief for most IT departments contenting with various security risks ranging from lost and stolen PC to compliance with increasingly strict privacy laws and regulations governing data security. This issue goes far beyond company’s PCs, where most of today’s office copier and printing systems use HDD, where capacity and performance to support productivity and security of recorded document image data must be maintained. To address this issue, Toshiba has announced the launch of series of Self-Encrypting Drives (SED) equipped with Wipe Technology, Toshiba’s proprietary suite of security functions. Wipe Technology would allow users to determine a range of security settings which includes invalidation of encrypted keys and data invalidation when the drive is removed from its housing or in an event that the drive is connected to an unauthorized host system. The five new models by Toshiba are of 2.5-type in MK6461GSYG family ranging from 160 gigabytes (GB) to 640GB in capacity, designed for use in copiers, printers, POS systems, PCs as well as other IT devices. Wipe Technology application is not limited to HDDs on various office equipments, Toshiba is planning to integrate this technology into solid state drives (SDD) in the future. Toshiba will start sample production from end of April with mass production to follow at the end of June.
