14 DAY TRIAL // Given the fact that the security of one's data is such an important topic nowadays, it should come as no surprise that just about all of the storage solutions' manufacturers out there trying to demo just how secure and “protective” their devices are, and this seems to be the case with Samsung as well, who's boasting around about the level of data protection delivered by its self-encrypting SSD drive. The Samsung SSD features advanced hardware-based self-encryption to protect confidential data from unauthorized access, a security capability based on the industry’s leading Trusted Computing Group’s Opal standard and featuring stronger 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) keys. According to the Korean company, the hardware encryption is always on, and both the data encryption and user authentication are performed in the high security of the drive controller, rather than being stored in software. Software encryption performs encryption using the main CPU of the PC and stores protected data in the insecure memory of the system, while, in contrast, self-encrypting drives (SEDs) encrypt data at interface speed with no impact on performance within the protected hardware of the SSD. Besides its security advantages, the Samsung SSD for corporate PCs provides sequential read/write speeds of up to 250/220 MB/s, and weighs 25 percent less than most traditional HDDs, providing a powerful combination of security, performance and convenience for corporate users on the go. In order to back up its claims, Samsung's also providing us with the conclusions of a research report on their self-encrypting SSD, “Full Drive Encryption with Samsung Solid State Drives,” which was released by Trusted Strategies earlier this month showing superior performance for a system equipped with a self-encrypting SSD over others using software encryption. As noted in the white paper, test results showed that a notebook PC system equipped with a self-encrypting SSD attained a 2.4 times higher level of overall performance than an SSD with software encryption and 3.7 times higher performance level than an HDD with software encryption (see graph below). “Faster and more secure than its predecessor, our new corporate-focused SSD is the only one with self-encryption built on TCG’s Opal standard that’s available on the market today,” said Jim Elliott, Vice President, Memory Marketing and Product Planning, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.
The Samsung self-encrypting SSD
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