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.
Then again...why would the government need to hide data?
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.
lol @ pos systems
Why not have these for larger drives as well? Drives go up to 3 TB.
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.
It will be a (Mission Impossible) thing letterly.