San Jose (CA) – Following yesterday’s announcement of Seagate’s self-encrypting hard drives, Hitachi today announced its own 2.5” encryption hard drives with up to 500 GB capacity, which consume less than half the power of your average 2.5” hard drive.

Hitachi’s new 2.5’ Travelstar 5K500.B mobile hard drive follows an increasingly popular trend that promotes data encryption technology that is built right into the drive. According to Hitachi, the drives can be purchased with an optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) feature, which encrypts data using a private security key as it is written to the disk and then decrypts it with the key as it is requested by the user.

Hitachi said the new drives integrate the TCG Storage Security specification, which supports pre-boot authentication in hardware, and up to four separate encrypted data ranges with multiple user and administrative authentication credentials. The company added an interesting feature by automatically rendering data on a hard drive unreadable when the encryption key is deleted. Hitachi believes that this will speed up the process of exchanging hard drives as the deletion of data is not necessary anymore. However, in the case of the Seagate drive, there is a similar effect as a forgotten or unavailable password will also prevent any access to the data on the drive.

What makes the 5400 rpm Travelstar E5K500.B especially is its power consumption of only 1.4 watts during read/write processes. We were not able to verify this claim, but if it is correct then the drive would not only consume only 10% of the power of average 3.5” 500 GB of last year, but less than half of what average 2.5” hard drives consume and even 10-20% less than what 1.8” drives tend to consume. Compared to SSDs, the power consumption is still substantially higher (exception: high performance SSDs), but it is certainly impressive how far the aging hard drive technology has come.     

Hitachi said that the Travelstar 5K500.B will be shipping worldwide in December. An enterprise focused version of the drive that is designed for applications requiring 24x7 operation in lower transaction environments (E5K500.B) will be available by the end of the first quarter 2009, Hitachi said.

sounds cool

Nov 11, 2008 04:53     

I've been out of the loop HDD-wise for a while now. But the concept of native drive encryption seems pretty cool.
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