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Instant Secure Erase: The Ultimate Solution for Drive Retirement and Disposal
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Secure erasure of an SED takes approximately 15 milliseconds, or less time than is required to press the Enter key. Unlike degaussing or physical destruction, secure erasure poses no impairment to a drive’s reusability or resale value. The process is inexpensive and convenient.
“Instead of having to babysit a wiping procedure for 39 hours for every drive, you can process a pile of 50 drives and be done in under an hour,” says Seagate’s Worth. “You just load a drive, issue the command to do theInstant Secure Erase, and boom—it’s done. This is every data center manager’s security dream come true.”
Some people assume that the trade off for SED secure erasure’s time savings and exceptional efficacy must be high cost. This is not true. In fact, SEDs may be the lowest total cost sanitization option on the market. Quite often, the price premium for an SED compared to a non-encrypting drive is in the low double digits. The secure erase functionality can be found in applications that are either free or built into RAID tools that would have been purchased already. The man-hours needed to sanitize batches of drives through Instant Secure Erase are a fraction of the time needed for similar overwrite/clearing sanitization. We know of no studies that assess crypto-erasure costs against other methods, but the case for Instant Secure Erase should be obvious, especially after handling time and reuse/resale value are considered.
Which drives can give your organization this cryptographic sanitization capability? We detailed this group in our prior article on SEDs, but here they are again:
Seagate Constellation ES: 3.5” SAS and SATA drives utilizing a 7,200 RPM rate. Capacities range up to 3 TB, making this drive excellent for nearline and archival storage.
Seagate Constellation: This is the 2.5” series within the Constellation family, still keeping the 7,200 RPM spin speed, but now with a 1 TB maximum capacity for higher density applications.
Seagate Savvio 10K: A 10,000 RPM, 2.5” drive with capacities up to 900 GB, the Savvio 10K strikes a balance between performance, capacity, and energy savings for mainstream enterprise applications.
Seagate Savvio 15K: The 15,000 RPM Savvio design represents the highest performance available today from magnetic media for Tier 1 storage. Sizes range up to 300 GB.
Coming Soon: Seagate Pulsar.2 & Pulsar XT.2: Seagate’s flagship SSD family targets speed and capacity with exceptional endurance for the most demanding transactional environments.
Each of these Seagate drive lines has SED model options. Start transitioning your organization’s storage assets over to self-encrypting drives and discover the many advantages tied to instant secure erasure.