Toshiba releases self-erasing drives

In a hypothetical situation where law enforcement investigating a crime might want to access data on the new SED drives, a public safety organization could subpoena the contents of the drive, "which would require that administrator certificates be provided that would allow the contents of the drive to be produced," Wright said.

Otherwise, the data would be unaccessible.

Toshiba's data invalidation attributes can be set for multiple data ranges, enabling targeted data in the drive to be rendered indecipherable by command, on power cycle, or on host authentication error, what Toshiba described as "an industry first."

"This flexibility provides systems designers with a powerful set of data security options that can be easily incorporated into existing system architecture," the company stated.

Customer sampling and volume production of the new SEDs will begin in the second quarter focused on designated system manufacturers and independent software vendors so they can integrate the latest data wipe technology features.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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