Equipment and systems with hard drives inside are continuously being retired, relocated or repaired and there's often little thought given to properly disposing of the data they contain before they leave the data center. Seagate is set to change that with its new HDD the world's first self-encrypting hard drives for mission-critical servers and storage arrays. As part of the award-winning Cheetah family, the new Cheetah 15K.6 FDE hard drive now also encrypts data as well. Moreover, that encryption goes anywhere the hard drive goes – whether it is moved, stored, or retired. Compared to other encryption technologies, self-encryption within the hard drive brings significant performance, management, and security benefits for users. Since the encryption engine is in the drive's controller ASIC, encryption is transparently fast and performance automatically scales with every drive added to a data center. Because there is no performance cost associated with encrypting more data, there is no need to make fine-grained decisions as to what data to protect – which can eliminate the need for data classification. Self-encryption requires no change to the OS, applications, or databases. Instantaneous Key-Erase™ technology, a standard on all Seagate FDE hard drives, facilitates quick and secure removal, whether for repurposing, returning for service, or disposal.

A recent investigation showed that 50% of the drives returned for servicing by customers contained readable sectors. If you assume that an average system's lifecycle is three to five years that suggests that more than 50 thousand enterprise drives are leaving data centers daily worldwide. If only half of those hard drives are readable, that's at least 2,500TB per day of exposed data available in the open market. The increasing flow of exposed sensitive data ought to be a serious concern to CIO's everywhere. In such a scenario, it is a safe bet for Seagate to introduce such a data encrypting HDD.