Most Drives to Be Self Encrypting

[Apoptosis]

I thought this e-mail that I just got from the NSA Trusted Computing Conference organizers was interesting...

Most Drives to Be Self Encrypting, Says New Report from Tom Coughlin

Day 2 in Orlando, Fla. at this week's NSA Trusted Computing Conference & Exposition, data storage industry analyst Dr. Thomas Coughlin, Coughlin Associates, today revealed the industry's first forecast examining the adoption of self-encrypting drives (SEDs).

A number of vendors already ship both HDD and SSD drives based on Trusted Computing Group's Opal specification for SEDs and enterprise drives are available from several vendors, as well.

Among the revelations in Coughlin's report:

Within 2 years (by 2013) SED capability will be in over 80 percent of SSDs and likely in almost all SSDs within 3 years (2014).
By 2017, almost all HDDs will include SED capability.
By 2016 the high, median and low estimates for security adoption for SED HDDs are 411 million, 315 million and 122 million units.

[kenc51]

But most people will leave it disabled in the firmware imo
Also most companies will do the same as they already use encryption software installed on their laptops.
Companies prefer to admin / manage their assets via a central server instead of dealing with individual HDD's.
It would be a nightmare to keep up with all the encryption keys on every HDD.
Symantec etc already have products that encrypt/decrypt drives before the bootloader.
You loose some performance sure, but most remote workers don't need the cpu power.

[Major_A]

Any way you guys can do an article with Bitlocker enabled/disabled? I'd be curious to see how much of a performance hit it would case. I assume encrypting everything slows down the storage system significantly. That's the reason I've never bothered to turn it on.

[kenc51]

Any way you guys can do an article with Bitlocker enabled/disabled? I'd be curious to see how much of a performance hit it would case. I assume encrypting everything slows down the storage system significantly. That's the reason I've never bothered to turn it on.

It doesn't slow down reads and writes from the disk as encrypted bits are still bits, but the cpu etc has to encrypt / decrypt the data before it can be read. It does slow things down significatly for real time applications, but for general usage it's not noticeable.
Today's CPU's can do the AES work with no penalty and the same goes for most SSD controllers (it's just disabled on consumer firmware)

There's a minor increase in write / read latency of ~5ms on a 7200rpm 2.5" mechanical hdd for drives with self encryption enabled. (@ least it is with the 2x drives ive used)

I'd also be interested in seeing some benchmarks for 3.5" mechanical drives, compairing it with the new i series (AES-NI enabled & disabled) using bit locker and truecrypt versus self encrypting drives.