Overview
Businesses and institutions of all sizes must meet compliance directives and regulations governing data privacy. Toshiba's 2.5-inch self-encrypting drives (SEDs) provide both advanced hardware encryption and strong access authentication to help IT departments and systems OEMs to cost-effectively deploy strong security without interrupting business flow or impacting application performance.

Designed to the Trusted Computing Group "Opal SSC" specification, Toshiba's SED models benefit from the broad industry support available for industry-standard TCG security features and capabilities. In addition, Toshiba offers SED models with unique wipe technology features, allowing OEMs and security solutions designers to provide additional safeguards for protected data.

Transparency and Improved Performance:
SED encryption processes are transparent to applications and operating systems. Unlike software encryption, which is dependent on CPU performance and system memory capacity, the SED's hardware encryption occurs inside the disk drive at full storage I/O speeds, ensuring that users will not see a reduction in application performance.

Stronger Security:
Built-in hardware encryption within the disk drive's controller electronics offers performance, lower overall cost, and security benefits beyond those available with software encryption. Toshiba's strong, government-grade AES-256 encryption is certified by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) through its Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) and because the encryption process happens inside the hard drive, stored data remains safe from the kinds of attacks used to compromise software encryption. Toshiba's unique wipe technology features allow OEMs and security solutions designers to provide additional security for protected data.

Ease of Deployment
SEDs encrypt data during disk read / write operations at full I/O speeds. This helps to significantly reduce IT support burdens during PC deployment, or when recovering or repurposing notebook systems. Compare this to software encryption, which requires application image loads to undergo a re-encryption process before data is secured.

Compatibility:
Toshiba works with leading third party security management applications for notebooks and other client PCs, allowing seamless integration of SEDs alongside existing software encryption deployments, to help maintain existing investments in enterprise client security applications and processes.

Reduced Cost and Improved Security Management:
SED's built-in hardware encryption can reduce the costs of client security applications and ensure uniform adherence to security policies. The built-in encryption also eliminates the need to escrow media encryption keys, reducing the complexity of key management.

Trusted Computing Group:
Opal Security Subsystem Class (Opal SSC) -

Trusted Computing Group – Learn More

Self-Encrypting