This week, TCG member SanDisk announced the X300 SSDs for enterprise. What’s new here is that these are the first self-encrypting drives in the SSD enterprise form factor from SanDisk, long known for its other SSD products.

In keeping with typical enterprise and corporate IT requirements, SanDisk has assembled a large group of supporting vendors including many TCG members, Absolute Software, Check Point Software Technologies, McAfee, Microsoft, Wave®Systems and WinMagic.

This is an exciting development for those IT and security staff tasked with data protection, and for those compliance and legal teams worried about preventing data breaches. Enterprise SEDs protect data all the time, on the fly with hardware-based encryption that cannot be turned out. These drives can be wiped almost instantly for disposal or repurposing, thereby preventing the inadvertent loss of data that occurs when drives are not properly handled at end of life and data goes walking. And these encrypting drives offer the same or better performance than non-encrypting drives, removing a common barrier to ongoing usage of software encryption.

SanDisk also notes, “…Additionally, the SanDisk X300s SSD offers lower latency and greater read/write speeds over traditional HDDs—delivering a noticeable improvement in system responsiveness—and is more reliable than self-encrypting HDDs or HDDs, which can help improve total cost of ownership (TCO) by reducing downtime due to hard drive failures.”

Notes SanDisk’s Tarun Loomba, vice president of client storage solutions marketing at SanDisk, “These solution providers will allow administrators to encrypt data, institute policies, and audit the end point for compliance. Our breadth of partners also ensures that the SanDisk X300s SSD can be a scalable solution for companies ranging from SMBs to large enterprises.”

Read more about these drives at http://www.sandisk.com/products/ssd/sata/x300s and SEDs here athttp://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/solutions/data_protection.