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Editor's draft profile:- UK based, Pangaea Media Ltd, was
established in 2008.
Among other things the company designs and markets external and internal
2.5" SSDs under
the SecureDrives brand.
see also:-
Pangaea
Media - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com editor's comments:-
March 2011
-
Pangaea Media has
recently launched its first SSD product - a 2.5" external flash SSD aimed
at the SSD backup market.
In addition to conventional encryption
features - the SecureDrives include fast
data sanitization
which can be triggered remotely by SMS messages and events such as tampering
with the casing.
Internally they use a
SandForce SSD controller
with Micron MLC NAND
flash and also X-Wall
MX-256 encryption processor from Enova
Technology.
What's new / unique about this product?
Many
other companies market fast
purge SSDs and remotely controlled SSD data destruction was first
introduced in the ZoneLoc
product - by WEDC
(now Microsemi) - in February 2009 for the
military market and
then by RunCore for the
notebook SSD
market in March
2010.
What appears to be different about the SecureDrives is the
implementation of the data destruction technology. Conventionally fast purge
is designed into the SSD and uses a combination of techniques including
blowing one time programmable fuses and generating on board high voltages to
create destructive charge breakdown in vital parts of the SSD chips. The
novel thing about Pangaea Media's technology is that it appears to use
ultrasonic shock waves to crack the memory chips. The patented method takes
about 300mS and uses energy from an embedded monitored battery.
I've
asked the company to tell our readers more about their marketing plans. For
example will they unbundle and license the data purge technology to other SSD
makers?
Here's extra info which they sent me. (A lot of this isn't on
their website yet.)
The PSD series has a host of security features
which are configurable by the user and include:
- On device authentication via touch screen
- User configuration PIN code retires between 2 & 8 times before the
device will self-destruct
- Hardware level AES256-Bit CBC encryption
- A user generated truly random 256Bit number via the touch screen
- GSM tracking and remote physical data destruction on demand
- Zero touch backup that backs up encrypted data from one device to the other
just by connecting two devices and without the need for a PC
- The device requires PIN authentication before it will allow the charge of
the internal battery
- Internal battery level monitoring and self-destruction if the battery
level runs to low
Pangaea Media (who prefer to be known as SecureDrives) says that
some of the other interesting optional features are:
- Monitoring for the presence of a GSM signal and if the device is starved of
a GSM signal for a user defined period of time the device will self-destruct
- The device controls its power consumption to avoid side channel attacks
- At the point of data destruction the device carries out 4 safety measures:
- Generates a new encryption key
- Overwrites the partition table with white noise
- Physically destroys the IC NANDs
- Physically destroys the security processor where the encryption key is held
There's a
video
on YouTube which shows the internal features of this drive. It doesn't show
you the chips exploding but it does show you what they look like afterwards.
Here
are some related articles and directories on
StorageSearch.com
 |
 |
| .. |
| SSD Data Recovery
Concepts..................... |
It's hard enough understanding the design
of any single SSD. And there are so
many different designs
in the market.
Have you ever wondered what it looks like at the
other end of the SSD supply chain - when a user has a damaged SSD which
contains priceless data with no usable backup? |
|
| | |
| ... |
| Fast Purge SSDs |
| The need for fast and
secure data erase - in which vital parts of a flash SSD or its data are
destroyed in seconds - has always been a requirement in military projects.
|
 |
Although many industrial
SSD vendors offer products with extended "rugged" operating
environment capabilities - and even
notebooks SSDs come
with encryption - it's the availability of fast data purge which
differentiates "truly secure" SSDs which can be deployed in
sensitive applications.
| | | |
| ... |
| StorageSearch
talks to SSD leaders... |
Fusion-io's
CEO - re MLC in banks.
Over 80% of the SSDs that
Fusion-io has sold in the last couple of years have been MLC rather than SLC -
and David Flynn
thinks that they probably have a bigger base of enterprise MLC SSDs which has
been operating longer in customer sites (upto 3 years) than any other company.
...read
the article |
 |
| ............................... |
Violin's CEO
- re Oracle acceleration market.
I asked about how Violin's
business was doing - and in particular were they seeing any drop-off in RAM
SSDs? Don
Basile said - on the contrary that their RAM based appliance business
was growing - and overall their SSD business was growing faster than anything he
had seen in previous companies. In the enterprise SSD acceleration market they
said they thought the next few years would see a lot of winners. ...read the article
Nimbus's CEO -
re the design of its NAS SSDs.
The 1st question I asked was about the
storage blades. I had already guessed (and he confirmed) the interface was SAS.
But the surprise came when I asked whose SSDs was he using? Thomas Isakovich
said Nimbus makes its own SSDs ... ...read the article
Texas Memory Systems
- re MLC and RAM SSDs.
Jamon Bowen
said current consumer grade MLC nand flash has endurance on the order of 3,000
write cycles. ... And the company's burn-in process (done for QA as part of
manufacturing) would use up 10% of the endurance life before the SSD even
reached the customer!
In many bank applications RAM SSDs are actually
cheaper than flash - because of the small size of the data. ...read the article | | |
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