Hitachi ships 2TB hard drives with bulk data encryption

Hitachi is now shipping their enterprise-class, 7200 RPM 2TB offering, the Ultrastar A7K2000.

This hard drive is designed, manufactured and tested to ensure mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) of 1.2 million hours in demanding 24×7 nearline applications. With a combination of high capacity and reliability, 7200 RPM performance, low power, the Ultrastar A7K2000 drive is suitable for applications such as data warehousing, disk-to-disk backup, cloud computing and massive scale-out storage implementations where storage density, GB-per-watt and cost-per-GB are critical parameters.

No IT manager wants their company to become front-page news as another enterprise that has suffered an embarrassing, accidental disclosure of sensitive data, or to be responsible for the associated liabilities involved. For this reason, the Ultrastar A7K2000 is also available with a bulk data encryption (BDE) option.

When enabled, the Hitachi BDE implementation encrypts all data on the drive using a private security key as it is written to the disk, and then decrypts it with the key as it is retrieved, giving users an extreme level of data protection. Unlike software-based encryption solutions, Hitachi’s BDE implementation is hardware-based, so it won’t slow the system down. Hitachi’s BDE also speeds up and simplifies the drive re-deployment and decommissioning process. By deleting the encryption key, the data is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming, multi-pattern data overwrite.

In its fourth generation, the Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 drive can be integrated into new and existing storage systems, enabling higher capacity density and drawing less power in the same 3.5-inch footprint. Specifically designed for the enterprise, Ultrastar SATA drives feature Hitachi’s patented Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) sensor technology, which optimizes drive performance in multi-drive RAID arrays and rack-mounted systems.

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