Activation: The operating system disk management utility activates, creates and maps volumes to ranges/bands as appropriate.

Identification: The operating system identifies that the drive is an Encrypted hard drive device type.

Your device operates more efficiently because processor cycles don't need to be used for the encryption process.Įncrypted hard drives are supported natively in the operating system through the following mechanisms:

Lower cost of ownership: There's no need for new infrastructure to manage encryption keys, since BitLocker uses your existing infrastructure to store recovery information.

Encrypted Hard Drives are easily erased using on-board encryption key there's no need to re-encrypt data on the drive.

Ease of use: Encryption is transparent to the user, and the user doesn't need to enable it.

User authentication is performed by the drive before it will unlock, independently of the operating system

Strong security based in hardware: Encryption is always 'on' and the keys for encryption never leave the hard drive.

Better performance: Encryption hardware, integrated into the drive controller, allows the drive to operate at full data rate with no performance degradation.

You can install Windows to encrypted hard drives without additional modification, beginning with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

Because Encrypted hard drives encrypt data quickly, enterprise devices can expand BitLocker deployment with minimal impact on productivity.Įncrypted hard drives are a new class of hard drives that are self-encrypting at a hardware level and allow for full disk hardware encryption.

Encrypted hard drive uses the rapid encryption that is provided by BitLocker drive encryption to enhance data security and management.īy offloading the cryptographic operations to hardware, Encrypted hard drives increase BitLocker performance and reduce CPU usage and power consumption.

External storage encryption