Hitachi Shows Off “Impenetrable” Hard Drive Security

November 2nd, 2006: Hot on the heels of Seagate’s announcement that it has added encryption at the disk level, Hitachi is showing off its new 2.5 inch mobile hard drive solutions with capacities exceeding 200GB, increased use of flash memory storage and disk level encryption similar to its competitor’s.

The company will be releasing a number of new products in the first half of 2007 which it says will address the speed, capacity and security needs of laptop users.

Firstly the company will be releasing a 200GB, 7200RPM notebook drive in the first half of 2007, and a 5400 RPM, 250GB in the second half. Both of these additions to its Travelstar line will use perpendicular recording technology.

Secondly Hitachi will be introducing a new flash memory hybrid drive. Flash memory has been used for a while in hard disk technology to store device firmware, however, with the decreasing cost of flash Hitachi sees greater opportunity to increase performance by storing some system functions to flash memory rather than on the disk. This would save a lot of spinning up and down of the disk, simultaneously increasing batter life and performance.

With increasing risk of laptop theft, data security is becoming a top priority for many companies. Hitachi has responded, like Seagate, by adding encryption at the disk level for all of its products. The company uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm to encrypt data written to both the disk and flash memory. It claims that this has no impact on system speed and is “virtually impenetrable”.

Industry analysts at IDC predict 2.5-inch hard drive annual shipments to double to 224 million units from 118 million in 2006, by which time Hitachi believes that its drive capacities could be in the 750GB range. More space for data can go hand in hand with greater risk of loss.

“A growing number of mobile PC users are placing a high value on storage capacity, performance, reliability and security while on the go,” says John Rydning, IDC’s Research Manager for hard disk drives. “There is a tremendous opportunity for HDD OEMs such as Hitachi to establish market leadership by delivering high capacity mobile 2.5-inch disk drives equipped with value-added features to meet these challenging requirements.”

Hitachi says its data encryption technology will be offered on all new 2.5-inch hard drives shipped from 2007 onwards.

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