Fastest drive wipping -world record set by Blancco

[August 3] JOENSUU, Finland-- Data security specialist Blancco has announced a world record for the speed at which its Pro 4.7 software can securely overwrite large amounts of hard drive data.

   Their product Blancco - Pro was able to erase 210 terabytes of data in a production environment within 19 hours, which translates to erasure speed over 184 GBs per minute and over 3 GBs per second!

   An unnamed datacentre customer in Germany recently used the product on its fibre channel SAN to destroy 210TB of data held on a large number of hard disks in only 19 hours. This was equivalent to wiping 184GB every minute, or 3.06GB every second, the company said.

   Each hard disk was overwritten seven times using a proprietary data destruction algorithm to meet the highest security standards possible, as part of an end-of-life cycle for the hardware. According to Blancco, the feat was accomplished thanks to the product’s ability to send wipe commands to a large number of drives at one time, making the whole process parallel. Desktop PC drive overwriting assumes serial addressing, and is therefore much slower.

   “Obviously speed is an issue,” commented Blancco product manager, Mikko Koponen. “If you are erasing at normal speeds, the erasure would take days or even weeks.”

    “Customers are not aware that when datacentres get rid of data there is not provision for data wiping,” he said. “The datacentre doesn’t want to pay for the erasure because it [data] belongs to the customer.”