Seagate announced its brand new addition to the Cheetah hard drive family with the release of the first self-encrypting hard drive technology targeted at servers and storage arrays. The new Cheetah 15K.6 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) hard drive family offers full data encryption technology that encrypts the data no matter where the drive is used, moved, stored or retired.

The full disk encryption technology that the Cheetah 15K.6 uses is something that enterprise customers have needed for a long time; enterprise customers have a need to keep data secured in all facets of the hard drive’s life span and with the Cheetah 15K.6 this is now possible.

Data breaches through careless disposal of hard drives continues to be a concern for business customers that store customer and business records on hard drives. Seagate claims that more than 50% of the hard drives that were returned to Seagate for service had readable sectors on the disk that contained data.

In some hard drive failure situations, using a software data wipe methodology is impossible due to failure of the physical hard disk itself, but because of the full disk hardware encryption used by the Cheetah 15K.6, the disposal of hard drives is no longer a concern because the data always stays encrypted on the drive.

The Cheetah 15K.6 uses an ASIC controller to handle the encryption of the drive transparently and there is no performance cost associated with the drive. Since the encryption technology that Seagate is using lives on the hard drive, no changes to applications or the OS are necessary.

Cheetah 15K.6 FDE hard drives will be available in 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB sizes using the SAS or FC interfaces. The Cheetah 15K.6 family will offer a five-year warranty and will ship to OEM customers starting this quarter.

Read the full press release from Seagate here.