Seagate's Self-Encrytping Drives Top 1 Million Shipments

Posted 02/16/2011 at 5:35am | by Paul Lilly

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Chalk up another milestone for Seagate, which this week announced it has shipped over 1 million self-encrypting laptop and enterprise hard drives. Seagate's hunch that there's a market for HDDs with built-in encryption so far seems to be spot on, and it hasn't hurt that these drives have managed to win U.S. government certifications. And thanks in part to computer makers like Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, and others stepping on board, Seagate said its enterprise SED shipments have tripled over the two quarters, while its laptop SED shipments have doubled in the past three years.

"Companies and government organizations worldwide increasingly are securing confidential information on self-encrypting hard drives, recognizing that this commonsense yet powerful approach simplifies the deployment of security for data at rest," said Charles Kolodgy, research director of security products for analyst group IDC. "As storage and security continue to converge, solutions like Seagate’s self-encrypting hard drives are leading the way by providing organizations with the strong, easy-to-use security they need to protect their data assets."

Seagate's enterprise SED options are found on the company's Savvio, Cheetah, and Constellation lines. According to Seagate, one of the main benefits in enterprise circles is the ability to repurpose these HDDs without the need to overwrite or physically destroy the drives.

For mobile users, Seagage slapped an AES encryption chip in the Momentus SEDs, which automatically encrypts all data on the drive, not just selected files and partitions. Security keys and cryptographic operations are contained within the drive and kept separate from the OS. This, Seagate says, prevents hackers from gaining backdoor access.

Image Credit: Seagate