Toshiba's New HDDs Destroy Data Automatically

Toshiba announced a series of self-encrypting hard drives that can actually wipe the data stored on them when they are connected to "an unknown host system."

Toshiba said that the drives are designed for use in PCs, printers, POS systems especially in government, financial and medical application fields.

The MK-61GSYG series of drives are based on the Opal specification of the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) to store and encrypt data and adds a "data wiping technology." Users can configure the data "invalidation" ranges to destroy the data by command, on power cycle or a host authentication error. According to Toshiba, the drive provides users and administrators an option to simply deny access to data following a failed user authentication or "crypto-erase" sensitive user data.

The drives will be sampling during the second quarter of this year and will be available with capacities of 160, 250, 320, 500 and 640 GB. All drives integrate a SATA 3 Gbps interface and rotate their platters at a speed of 7200 RPM. Toshiba did not announce prices for the new drives.