Toshiba Ups The Ante With 600GB 2.5" Self-Encrypting Hard Drive

Solid State Drives may be the next big thing, but hard drives aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Not until everyone wins the lottery, anyway. Toshiba has this week introduced their newest 2.5" drive, a 600GB unit that marks the company's first SAS self-encrypting enterprise drive. For starters, 600GB is a lot of space for a 2.5" form factor drive, and Toshiba claims that this new MBF family represents the industry's highest-capacity 2.5-inch enterprise-class HDD.

It's also the company's first enterprise-class self-encrypting drive (SED), which "demonstrates the successful integration of Toshiba and Fujitsu's HDD business last year and illustrates Toshiba's capability and commitment to building further leadership in the enterprise market." If you're concerned over performance, you probably shouldn't be. This one is capable of a 10,025 rpm spin speed and a 6Gb/sec SAS interface for use in volume servers, mainstream storage arrays, blade and rack-mount servers and other business-critical, power-conscious, data-intensive applications.

The MBF line also reduces power consumption up to 28 percent, using a new enhanced power condition state, which enables the HDD to spin at a lower RPM when not in use. Exact pricing has yet to be mentioned, but if the 600GB model is too expensive come April, a 300GB and 450GB model will also be made available.

"With a 600GB maximum capacity, lower power consumption and smaller footprint, Toshiba's small form factor enterprise HDDs further enable the growing trend of enterprise system migration from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch HDDs," said Joel Hagberg, vice president of enterprise marketing at Toshiba Storage Device Division. "Optional inclusion of Toshiba's SED technology supports endpoint protection in data-sensitive environments. This total package offers an efficient and effective solution for enterprise storage system manufacturers and system builders."

Self-Encrypting Drives

Certain models of the MBF series offer an option of drive-based encryption designed to the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Enterprise Security Subsystem Class specification. The TCG specifications provide standards-based protocols to promote industry-wide adoption by HDD vendors, security management independent software vendors (ISVs), independent hardware vendors (IHVs) and storage system designers. The transparency of encrypting data within the storage device simplifies the deployment and provides an easier path to compliance with regulatory mandates for stronger security practices. As such, SEDs have become an important component in the enterprise environment with features such as secure erase, which makes the repurpose and retire process easier for organizations that use these drives.

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