A new drive has been out in the market lately called Self-encrypting drives. What is your take with self-encrypting drives? Are they more secured than regular drives with data encryption software?
How are they useful for data storage and security?
Hello Alden.
I'd like to outline the advantages of self-encrypting drives first:
1. There is negligible performance hit as compared to software-based encryption due to the encryption being at the firmware level.
2. Users can sometimes tamper with software-based encryption by turning it off without notifying their network administrators. With self-encrypting drives, this will not be possible.
On the other hand, here are the disadvantages:
1. It is costly because enterprises will have to replace their current hard drives.
2. There is currently no way to centralize management of these self-encrypting drives.
To answer your question, yes, it can be said that self-encrypting drives are more secure than conventionally-encrypted hard drives. However, the cost of ownership hinders its adoption.
Hope this provides you with some useful insight.
