Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. has just dropped an announcement concerning its new full disk encryption (FDE) 2.5″ 7,200RPM SATA hard disk drive, bringing a whopping 320GB of storage space to the table while offering the industry’s highest security standard for data at rest. The Fujitsu MHZ2 CJ series is proud to claim the mantle of being “the first HDD in the world to support the hardware-based AES-256 bit encryption standard”, preventing unauthorized access by virtue of setting a password. High performance and maximum data security? I like the sound of that – it certainly makes the mouth water.

Fujitsu’s take on security is slightly different as current software-based security solutions has encryption keys that exist in system memory whenever the system is being used, and in addition to that, the encryption is computationally intensive, which is detrimental to the system performance. Fujitsu’s MHZ2 CJ series will rely on the hard drive’s hardware to perform both encryption and decryption, freeing up the CPU for more important tasks. Heck, the key used to encrypt and decrypt data is cryptographically regenerated whenever the correct password is received at power-on, and won’t be able to be attained whenever the system is turned off. Data encryption and decryption will be done automatically without any impact on the system performance. The spate of laptop thefts in recent news also makes such a solution all the more viable, so bosses of large corporations, take not if you value your organization’s data.

The Fujitsu MHZ2 CJ series also comes with a special advanced secure erase feature that immediately invalidates every piece of data just by changing the in-drive encryption key, turning the stored data completely indecipherable. Such an immediate and secure erasure ensures both time and money savings will be trickled down to the company’s bottom line, which is always good for shareholders. I suppose folks who download plenty of illegal stuff from their homes would appreciate this feature as well, considering the overzealous folks at the RIAA when it comes to dispatching their duties.

Press Release