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.

Destroying hard drives, what a waste

Many financial and government organisations choose to destroy the hard drives that are declared as failing and removed from their arrays. They use products like this which make the hard drive unusable.

What happens to these hard drives? I presume they just end up in landfill and aren't recycled. Is it beyond the wit of man to find another solution?

First of all, a large number of these drives haven't actually failed. They've been marked as having a potential to fail by the array and before a hard failure occurs, the data is moved off to a hot spare. Naturally it is more efficient to copy parity generated data like RAID-5/6 to another drive than to read all drives in the parity group and rebuild the data.

Second, we are imbedding encryption directly into the drive itself. Can't we simply create a drive where the keys can be wiped in the event that the drive needs to be recycled? This seems to me to be the simplest and most elegant solution.

Incidentally, I checked the Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) website and could only see some nice words about caring about the environment but nothing specific relating to recycling itself.