Who will be the last HD maker down the road? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

9 Mar 2011

On Wed, 09 Mar 2011 23:37:13 -0600
cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:

...
  Message: 6
 Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 13:39:02 -0800
 From: Christian Kennedy <chris at mainecoon.com>
 Subject: Re: Who will be the last HD maker down the road?
 To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech at classiccmp.org>
 Message-ID: <77B95B40-4467-469B-B8EB-203C21DEAE3D at mainecoon.com>
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

 On Mar 9, 2011, at 12:46 PM, Eric Smith wrote:

  That's why the "secure erase"
commands were added to the ATA command
 set, and the drive is supposed to erase even the spared blocks.    
 Sandforce takes this one step further in that their SSD drives have AES
 encryption turned on by default.  If you issue a ATA secure delete to the
 drive the key is wiped and regenerated, rendering all of the data in
 flash, both primary and spare, into garbage. 
That's a good theory, but you have no way of knowing whether there's key
escrow or not. The safest thing is to use your own encryption, then you
know the key will not wind up on the drive somewhere. That's pretty easy to
do on Windows or Linux these days.