MCE And Excelstor: Hard Drives With Security Functions

MCE and Excelstor are attempting to set themselves apart from the huge hard drive market with a novelty: a drive with integrated chip-level security functions. This immunizes the GStor Plus hard drive against software attacks, and enables it to be controlled via the network independently of the user.

The MR2060 security chip encrypts the hard drive with 64 bits at no loss of speed.

AES encryption algorithms for 256 bits should follow this year. The manufacturer was unable to make any comment regarding a possible BIOS update.

The GStore Plus is now available in an 80 GB IDE model. The model can only be run on the primary master.

The operating system must be installed on this drive when using GStor Plus in a system. The manufacturer was unable to give concrete answers to our queries about storage capacities and a SATA interface.

The BIOS must always be loaded before the drive can boot the operating system.

The password is requested after every boot process, an option which can be turned off if required.

The hard drive is equipped with a bus, enabling physical allocation of a network connection to every partition on it.

The optional network switch card only comes in a 10/100 MBit version.

The ExcelStor Network Firewall monitors and controls the hard drives and partitions via an encrypted VPN environment.

The drive is equipped with a recovery system which lets you restore the complete installed system to an earlier point in time. This feature takes up double the storage space, leaving the user with a mere 40 GB of space, so this is obviously only for special applications. The product from MCE and Excelstor is still at the beta stage. The price of the GStor Plus for consumers is expected to be around $150.