Samsung's SSD division has recently announced that it has released the industry's first self-encrypted Solid State Drives, as part of a collaboration between Samsung Electronics and Wave Systems. The new drives are specifically designed to provide professionals with a reliable solution for their digital content, combining both security and fast performance in a single package. They are available in capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB and have already been selected by PC vendor Dell as an optional upgrade for its portable computer systems.

“Samsung has combined the tremendous performance advantages of solid state technology with integrated hardware encryption for drives designed especially for today's 'road warrior' professionals,” said Jim Elliott, memory vice president, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. "Business users now get the best of performance and security in a single drive.”

Samsung's new self-encrypting Flash-based drives have been designed to take advantage of the security features enabled by Trusted Computing Group's (TCG) 128-bit encryption. This solution makes use of hardware-based encryption and can enable faster performance compared to currently available software-based encryption. This Full Disk Encryption (FDE) is said to be more secure and easy to manage, through the help of the bundled Wave EMBASSY management software.

The benefits of FDE include faster performance, better security and an “always on” feature. The better security is justified by the fact that the access credentials are available on the drive itself, not on the operating system or any other software-based solution. In addition, thanks to the implementation of the FDE technology on Samsung's SSDs, users take advantage of faster boot-up speeds, application start, longer battery life and generally a more silent computing experience.

Samsung's new SSDs combine performance and security in a single package that is available as an option for Dell's laptops with 256GB, 128GB and 64GB capacities. Unfortunately, Samsung hasn't unveiled any specific details on the drives' pricing.