Toshiba launches self-encrypting, auto-wiping HDD

cool, lets hope this is avaiable to consumers as well :)

Hmm can't wait for the first person to forget their authentication and accidentally wipe their drive. Better have a good backup.

I hope it's also camouflaged as a more rudimentary drive. Otherwise anyone that has a need to will just transfer platters to another controller and run decryption from there.

Quote:

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Whenever the drive is powered on, it will initiate authentication with the host and if it that process fails, the data is "invalidated."

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... And, one more thing to consider. If the drive authenticates the host, what happpens if the host gets damaged?

Great for Paedos and terrorrists... that must be the target market surely , as Government and medical stuff always gets leaked / hacked ...

oh yes we all want a drive that if its pulled from our machine that it can tell that its been stolen or can it if I hook this drive up as a secondary drive and not boot to it bet ya I can still get the data.. or if I clone the drive the run a password picker like ( Orphus )that reads rainbow tables I can get in...its only as good as the person who wrote the software it will be hacked as soon as it becomes public... sorry its just better to know where your stuff is and if its that important burn it to a dvd and put it in a safe off site...

Next, a virus that unmounts, remounts and fails authentication to wipe the target's drives.

Just wait for a hardware failure, fix the PC and Auto Wipe-Ola all data gone, Oooops!

But there will be a way around this which means those who want to hack it still can of course. Waste of money would be my guess.

Is this stealth also?

Well, it's not for average consumer use...it says it's for bankers and government workers and such, so they dont have to worry about their laptop dying, because they are usually replaced by the company.

It looks like it's really designed to store sensitive documents and financial information for huge corperations...An average consumer may have a problem with the HDD, but yeah, it's not designed for them...