Universal Disk Encryption Spec Finalized

Lucas123 writes "Six of the largest disk manufacturers, along with encryption management software vendors, are backing three specifications finalized [Tuesday] that will eventually standardize the way encryption is used in firmware within hard disk drives and solid state disk drive controllers ensuring interoperability. Disk vendors are free to choose to use AES 128-bit or AES 256-bit keys depending on the level of security they want. 'This represents interoperability commitments from every disk drive maker on the planet,' said Robert Thibadeau, chief technologist at Seagate Technology."

Comments

Re:Why not just use TrueCrypt?

[dido]

However (and purely as an example), Linux's software RAID is faster than many hardware RAID controllers, and a system lacking a dedicated hardware RAID controller very well may use less power than an equivalent system with one.

Speaking from experience, this seems to be true only of the 'fakeraid' setups that you see on cheap RAID controllers, which aren't really hardware RAID at all. They cheat and instead use firmware that executes on the main CPU to do the RAID, making them no better in principle and more often than not worse in performance than the Linux kernel's heavily optimized high-performance software RAID implementation. True dedicated hardware RAID controllers, such as the HP Smartarray, IBM ServeRAID, and the RAID controllers you see on fiberchannel SANs, are actually quite rare except in enterprise setups, and they are in general much faster than the Linux software RAID implementation.

But of course, nothing stops a manufacturer from doing bad engineering and making a product that has a dedicated piece of hardware that actually does the job slower than the main CPU would. And performance is not the only reason to make a dedicated hardware implementation of some bit of functionality. It could be done for "trusted computing" purposes for instance, in which case, it doesn't matter that it's slow, just that it keeps control out of the hands of the main CPU.