Toshiba's New HDDs Destroy Data Automatically
Toshiba announced a series of self-encrypting hard drives that can actually wipe the data stored on them when they are connected to "an unknown host system."
Toshiba said that the drives are designed for use in PCs, printers, POS systems especially in government, financial and medical application fields.
The MK-61GSYG series of drives are based on the Opal specification of the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) to store and encrypt data and adds a "data wiping technology." Users can configure the data "invalidation" ranges to destroy the data by command, on power cycle or a host authentication error. According to Toshiba, the drive provides users and administrators an option to simply deny access to data following a failed user authentication or "crypto-erase" sensitive user data.
The drives will be sampling during the second quarter of this year and will be available with capacities of 160, 250, 320, 500 and 640 GB. All drives integrate a SATA 3 Gbps interface and rotate their platters at a speed of 7200 RPM. Toshiba did not announce prices for the new drives.
- Toshiba,
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- hdd ,
- ssd ,
- data-encryption ,
- notebook-hdd
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This would be useful for laptops that need to be super-secure.
Agreed, for laptops or government office's.
If someone needs to take sensitive data from a government HDD, I doubt that they would simply connect it to any computer (which then crypto-erase). They would probably take the platters out and do a manual data extraction.
This would be great for those that don't want someone else seeing their data
No, they usually take the whole system, or just copy the files from withing the system. If they can't do that, then they'll take the harddrives. If they KNOW they will auto-erase, then maybe they'd consider taking out the platters.
Then again...why would the government need to hide data?
To be honest I can't see much use in this. If someone really needed that data they could take the entire system, extract the plater itself or probably just circumvent the wiping process. I find myself skeptical that Toshiba has built a bulletproof method
My old hard drive did this all the time...wait a minute...that wasn't a feature..
id rather the drives self encrypt to 2024bit if you don't use a special key. it allows the user to be able to get the data back, without them being realistically able to peak inside.
It's a lot easier to reach confidential files through OS exploits than disassembling a disk. Actually sensitive files are much more likely to be stored on a redundant file server instead because... For the case some HDD with that sort of protection dies one is to pay perhaps $25000 for the files to be recovered and the contents may eventually be leaked by the data recovery company.
Others have stated some of the flaws in this already. This is just another marketing Gimmick. Once someone has unfiltered physical access to your machine, everything on it is theirs for the taking.
Its difficult enough to keep a hacker from accessing things on an internet connected PC, its impossible if you give the PC to the hacker.
At first I thought the headline was in regard to some kind of recall. lol
"Toshiba said that the drives are designed for use in PCs, printers, POS systems"
lol @ pos systems
All your cute kitten pictures are belongin...not so fast!
What about SATA 6 Gbps?
Why not have these for larger drives as well? Drives go up to 3 TB.
Stick a bootable USB drive in it and it messes with the bios and gets all the data deleted.
I thought the IBM Deathstar drives already destroyed data years ago
They did, but not very realiable... Sometimes there were some information left behind...
;-)
/sarcasm of...
But in reality, if this works well it would be guite usefull in big companies. Maybe they could start the HD-wipe remetely, in the case if someone rob the computer.
What if your HDD is failing -which is a common thing among notebooks- and you want to recover the data, what would you do in that case?
It will be a (Mission Impossible) thing letterly.
Like a post that I seen at hothardware that said that this technology would be good for people that own porn servers,etc in case their porn gets ripped off.
what if I has stuff on the interwebs!!!
i hope toshiba made desktop drive too since hitachi is gone ......
What? Toshiba drives have been doing this for years... I guess they found a way to make their defects into a feature.
This is an ok idea however as some have pointed out the positives are outweighed by the negatives (if a drive knows how to wipe data off itself without the intervention of the OS, how do you guarantee that it won't wipe off the data by accident).
You can't just "take out the platters", the only data you would be able to extract would be in encrypted form, which is useless without the key.
You can't just "take out the platters", the only data you would be able to extract would be in encrypted form, which is useless without the key.
True, but now you have all the time in the world to try and crack the code, or find the key, without the data being deleted after the first attempt.
"Toshiba said that the drives are designed for use in PCs, printers, POS systems"lol @ pos systems
Been in the industry for too long
But yes, I do think the same thing as well when I see POS before logging in to take someones order
And here I thought it was only Seagate drives that were designed to delete their own data.
Sweet, I could then "borrow" my friends' hdds and simply turn them on in my system to quickly wipe his drives clean.
The solution for the platter extraction is simple. Toshiba needs to make the drive self destruct/explode when open lol.