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HDD vs. SSD, data encryption vs. speed

November 15, 2008 · Filed Under Hardware & Peripherals, News

The tense fight between microchip and the pair plate+head has reached a new high in these days, as manufacturers have announced the introduction of technologies able to make on the one hand more desirable and secure the traditional magnetic hard disks, on the other hand more performing the always expensive solid state disks (SSD) based on NAND flash memory chips.

If the undoubted appeal of the presently unbeatable cost/size ratio and the promise to achieve the 4 Terabytes of nominal capacity within the next 4 years wouldn’t be enough, the last novelty for the magnetic HDD is the so-called full-disk encryption (FDE). A typical FDE-compliant disk is able to encrypt and decrypt data in real-time during the I/O operations with no need for the user to install additional software. All is needed is to give a password to the system BIOS, which will then leave to the drive’s firmware the rest of the work together with the task to protect the keys used for the encryption.

The idea to move the real-time data encryption from software to hardware isn’t new, like so the dangers linked to this kind of practice: considering the strength of the used algorithms, losing of forgetting the password means to doom all the data stored on the HD. Whatever it is the FDE disks should become the de facto standard for the next future personal computing, and the almost simultaneous announcements from Seagate, Hitachi and Fujitsu confirm the widespread will to bring military-level protection technologies to common consumer or corporate users.

The FDE adoption starts from the mobile area: all the three above said manufacturers have announced the marketing to OEM players of SATA 2.5 inches disks, with different sizes and features but all united by the use of FDE technology based on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm with a 256 bit key, capable of bringing a protection level that the USA NSA agency rates suitable for TOP SECRET classified information.

The first company to announce the introduction of FDE technologies in its drive is Seagate, that while dealing with reliability issues on its 1,5 Terabytes Barracuda disks takes the time to renew its laptop HD line-up with the Momentus FDE models operating at 5400 or 7200 rpm and with 320 Gigabytes of storage capacity. Future versions of the currently delivered drives will also include a 500 GB model. In addition to AES, drives meant for corporate environments will have the McAfee EPO technology for advanced management of data protection mechanisms.

After only a day from the Seagate announcement Hitachi has been the second company to state to be ready to embrace the FDE hardware technology with the 5400 rpm Travelstar 5K5500.B model, that contrariwise to Momentus FDE will be marketed straightaway in the 500 Gigabytes version within the first quarter of 2009. Hitachi’s encryption works with 256 bit AES keys too, and the Japanese manufacturers highlights how the new Travelstar is distinguished, besides security, also by a better environmental sustainability of power consumption with a maximum 1.4 watts drained during writing operations.

“Customers are asking us for hard drives that require less power, provide more data security, have great performance and are environmentally friendly” Hitachi’s vice-president Brendan Collins states underlining the two main market trends of the last times. Security and environmental sustainability are in fact the two keys hit by Fujitsu too, whose new 2.5″ 5400 rpm drives will be available in two different versions with or without the FDE technology.

Available in 250, 320, 400 and 500 Gigabyte editions, the Fujitsu HDD will be marketed during the next weeks, will have the same performance both in the FDE-powered version and in the normal one (with a currently unknown price difference between the two), will be halogen elements free to better respect the environment and will consume, like Hitachi’s Travelstar, only 1.4 watts of energy during the I/O operations.

And if nowadays the magnetic hard disks motto is “security”, the SSDs have other issues to confront: insofar as globally far superior in the data access speed than traditional HDs, solid state disks performances are heavily affected by the drive ICs and the optimizations available (or unavailable) within the operating system code. In the second case Windows 7 will bring several improvements compared to Vista and XP to exploit the SSDs at their best, while in the first SanDisk has announced to plan the making of drives able to write and read files with a speed 100 times faster than the current one.

Waiting for the Japanese engineers to develop the long-time life NAND flash, during the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) SanDisk has shown the features of its new ExtremeFFS technology. A technology that is built upon a “page-based” algorithm in which, contrariwise to the magnetic disks, there is no fixed correlation between the data logical and physical location. ExtremeFFS takes advantage of the SSDs superior access speed to ascertain that when “a sector of data is written, the drive puts it where it is most convenient and efficient” scattering the data among the various memory chips within the drive. The first SanDisk branded SSDs to include ExtremeFFS will be marketed starting from 2009.