Qualstar Into Technology Development Agreement With Sony Imaging Products and Solutions

Qualstar Corporation entered into a technology development agreement with Sony Imaging Products and Solutions Inc.

Pursuant to the agreement, the company will design and develop the specifications and architecture for an enterprise optical disc archive library. The agreement, which can be terminated by Sony Corporation at any time, provides that the firm will receive installment payments for its services, which are expected to be completed by March 31, 2018.

Following completion of the services, the parties may enter additional agreements relating to the production of the enterprise optical disc archive library.

Toshiba Following Western Digital/HGST With 14TB 3.5-Inch HDD

Toshiba Electronic announced the MG07ACA Series, the world's first enterprise 14TB Conventional Magnetic Recording HDD.

Using a 9-disk, helium-sealed design, the drive provides the power-efficient capacity and storage density needed by cloud-scale and enterprise storage solution providers to achieve their TCO objectives.

They have raised the bar with the new MG07ACA Series 9-disk helium-sealed design, by utilizing an innovative design, they continue to improve the benefits that high-capacity disk storage can deliver to their broad global customer base.

The MG07ACA Series features both 14TB 9-disk and 12TB 8-disk models. The helium-sealed 3.5-inch mechanical design realizes better storage density and a lower HDD operating power profile than the previous MG06ACA Series for optimal TCO in cloud-scale infrastructures.

The series also utilizes Toshiba Group's laser welding technology to ensure the helium remains securely sealed inside the drive enclosure.

The drives support a 6Gb SATA interface and 7,200rpm access performance. The 9-disk 14TB models achieve a 40% increase in maximum capacity over previous MG06ACA 10TB models.
Additionally, the 14TB models improve power efficiency by over 50% (W/GB).

Toshiba's first helium-sealed near line drive intercepts the market at a class-leading 14TB capacity with CMR. Its early time-to-market for this capacity positions the company well to meet the storage needs of large hyperscale and cloud companies. Additionally, the company's choice of a 9-disk platform paves the way to achieving higher capacities in future product generations.

While enterprise server and storage customers realize that shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology can improve HDD capacity, the adoption of SMR HDD products into server and storage systems is a transition that will take several years. 

Sample deliveries of MG07ACA Series drives to customers sequentially begin now.

People Too Often Fail to Properly Erase Personal Data in Used HDDs/SSDs – Kroll Ontrack

Putting personal information at risk

Kroll Ontrack, LLC carried out a security study that indicated we are putting our personal information at risk far too easily.
The data recovery company analyzed used drives to see if any traces of data remained after the previous owners sold them. Among the drives the company examined, traces of data were found on nearly half. Many of these innocent oversights allowed the new owners critical access into the previous owners' identity.
Despite user efforts to erase data, it can often be recovered if not done properly. This makes selling personal digital devices a matter of identity protection. The study involved an international scope, with a diverse array of countries taking part: the US, Germany, France, Italy, the AsiaPac region, Poland and the UK.
For the campaign, Kroll Ontrack purchased 64 drives from various sources over eBay (private sellers/consumers) and analyzed whether the used drives had been successfully wiped clean or still contained any traces of data. The study found that traces of data remained on 30 drives (47%), while the remaining 34 drives had been successfully cleaned (53%).

However, the likelihood of finding access to personal information was not the study's most concerning finding, but rather how sensitive that information often was. For the careless or uninformed user, selling personal data devices is little more than selling your identity.
 
The case of one drive epitomized the danger of identifying data traces. The drive had belonged to a company that used a service provider to erase and resell old drives. Despite that, the drive still contained a wealth of highly sensitive information, including user names, home addresses, phone numbers and credit card details. It contained an employee list of around 100 names that included information about work experience, job titles, phone numbers, language abilities, vacation dates and a 1MB offline address book.

The personal realm was not the only one affected, as work-related information also finds its way very often onto private devices. As such, business data extracted from the drives was also not in short supply. Six drives were found to contain critical business data such as CAD files, PDFs, jpegs, keys and passwords. Kroll Ontrack even found full online store set ups, configuration files and POS training videos in their scour of these six drives. A further five contained other work-related data: invoices and purchase orders, much of it including sensitive personal information

The best method to delete data is low-level formatting, which involves pattern filling drives at the lowest level. This method effectively resets drives back to the factory settings. Multiple overwrites provide additional security, especially when data erasure needs to meet specific legal overwrite standards. Professional products distinguish themselves by the following features: independent certifications, using internationally standard algorithms, detailed reporting and traceability of executed deletions.