Recycling Drives - Update

Last week I posted about wasted hard drives, removed from arrays and crushed to prevent the leak of sensitive data.

I contacted HGST and Seagate to get some additional background. Here are their responses, slightly edited to correct any spelling mistakes but otherwise intact.

Seagate

(a) when will the technology be deployed in Enterprise FC drives? Our OEMs are currently developing with the Cheetah 15K.6 FDE, a drive that Seagate has already in production.

(b) is the technology proprietary to Seagate? - No, this will becompliant with the Trusted Computing Group's spec. All hard drive vendors are participating in this Trusted Computing Group and we expect that they will have self-encrypting drives that will be inter-operable with ours.

(c) is DriveTrust accepted by the US Government and other similar organisations as secure enough to treat a drive as "wiped" if the encryption keys are removed? Endorsement from National Security Agency (NSA) has already been received for the 1st Self-Encrypting Drive Model-the Momentus(r) 5400 FDE hard drive, for protection of information in computers deployed by U.S. government agencies and contractors for national security purposes.

(d) are any of the "big" manufacturers (EMC/HDS/IBM) looking to deploy DriveTrust enabled drives in storage arrays? IBM and LSI have both publicly announced that they will do so. Note that Hitachi has also just announced a self-encrypting drive, the Deskstar E7K1000, a drive designed for business critical storage systems.

(e) Where do the drives go when they're wiped for final disposal? Extra shipping is involved to ship a drive to a special data destruction service facility, where it can be degaussed or shredded, and then the drive must be shipped to [be] environmentally disposed of. Alternatively, a drive may be over written, a process that takes hours and hours, using energy and tying up system resources, and then may be re-purposed.


HGST

My name is Masaru Masuda, working on product planning for Hitachi GST. Let me try to answer your question. Like Raj mentioned below, we have already supported bulk encryption feature for 2.5" and 3.5"and will support it to Enterprise product next year. With the bulk encryption feature, user data on the HDD media is automatically and always encrypted by the SoC inside [the] HDD. The security feature has two basic functions. One is active protection of data (encryption with secret key) and secure erase of the drive by deleting the encryption key for repurposing or disposal. As you pointed out, Standardization is a key for security. Therefore, a non profit security organization called TCG (Trusted Computing Group) was formed as described in the page 5 and 6 of the attached package. We have been very actively involved in the activities of TCG and plan to pick up security feature based on TCG standards which will be implemented from next year.The security market is still small but it has been growing steadily due to the data security concern and also as a fast and cheap solution for repurposing of drives in Server applications or disposal of failed drives. Also we have had a recycling process for drives failed in the internal testing and for drives returned from the field.

Thanks to both companies for their responses.

So it seems to me that in the future there will be no excuse for scrapping drives. I think the retirement process for HDDs should form part of the "green measurement" of storage.

Green Poll

Here are the results from the green poll (13 votes only :-( )



Q: Is the discussion of green storage just hype?

• 54% - Yes it is hype, vendors are riding the bandwagon
• 15% - No, it is an important issue and vendors are solving it
• 15% - I'm not sure still deciding
• 15% - No, it is an important issue and vendors are not solving it
  

Highly unscientific due to the poll size but I have to agree that a lot of the discussion is smoke and mirrors.

While we're on the subject I had a look at Western Digital's "green" hard drives. They are claiming with a little bit of clever code, they can reduce the power demands of their higher end SATA range. Here's a clip of the specific new features taken from their literature:


IntelliPower™ — A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size
designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.
IntelliSeek™ — Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption,
noise, and vibration.
IntelliPark™ — Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the
heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.

The use of these techniques is claimed to reduce idle time to 4.0W and average read/write to 7.5W per drive. I've had a look at other manufacturers and this is a saving of about 4W per drive. WD make plenty of statements as to how much this represents in cost and no doubt it is a good thing that manufacturers are thinking in this way, however it does make me think we should be examining exactly what data we're storing on disk if we are happy with a just large saving in idle time. If this data is not inactive then obviously the power savings are less, but there's no free lunch here and if data is active then a drive is going to use power. SATA drives may be able to compromise on performance but I can't imagine anyone purchasing nice fast 15K drives will want to compromise in any way. (While I think of it, developing a tiered storage strategy should include evaluating the "cost" of accessing the data in power terms)