New Two-Headed Hard Drive Intended To Secure Web Sites

dlur writes: "This article states that Scarabs (In Japanese), a Japanese company, is developing a hard drive with two heads, one read-only and another that is read/write. With this comes two cables, the read-only side going to the external web server, and the r/w cable going to an internal protected server. While this should make it quite a bit tougher for script kiddies to place their mark on a page, I doubt it will stop any real hackers from getting to a site's DB as that would still need to be r/w."

Re:Hey before you go out and buy one

[doughnuthole]

Or you could put a switch on IDE pin 23, the write line. Flipping the switch to disconnect the line would prevent any data from being written, while still having the higher speeds and lower seek times of a hard drive.

It would be simple to just flip the switch, modify your files and then switch it back when you are done so no changes can be made later.

Even better, put it on an electronic keyswitch mounted on the front of the box, and you have an effective security system for things like demo stations and kiosks.

Re:Do it for SPEED, not SECURITY

[Anonymous Coward]

congrats. you just halved your MTBF. two heads == double the chance of a head destroying a platter.

good for dumb MBAs / VC and idiot security staff

[noahbagels]

Great.

Now, we have to explain one more thing to VCs and MBAs. All they know is there is this thing called a website that exists on a thing called a webserver.

Hasn't anyone on /. ever taken a security class?
Has anyone on /. ever worked in on security projects and/or audits?

Let me break it down for the rest of you:
This ads exactly zero extra security for a well-run website. Most well-run sites already have seperately firewall'd http-webservers and database machines. Some well-run sites have the application server on yet a third firewall'd network (or vlan etc).

Any place worth 5cents will not have valued data sitting on an httpd server!

This is really Ooooga-Boooga in a nutshell for VCs and MBAs trying to make a buck on security-scared VCs and MBAs running other companies.

I don't buy it.
Secure your site properly - as one other poster mentioned, for the less-funded (read: cheap/poor/startup/blah) company/service you can simply mount a CD-R with your site's static content on it. Even JSPs can live on a CDr (as long as they're precompiled into servlets, or there's a scratch disk for the JSP-container to compile them).

Re:More Speed?

[Callamon]

It would need to use option 2 for a performance gain.. Otherwise you'll actually incur a performance hit due to contention for the armature between the 2 machines.

It shouldn't be too difficult to add a second arm, that wouldn't interfere with the primry R/W head. Of course it does double the chances of a head-crash... This is the way that it appears to be being done according to the web site [scarabs.com]

Re:More Speed?

[nerdbert]

Nice in theory, but it won't fly. Two arms means replicating some of the most expesive parts of the drive all over again. Double electronics (servo, preamp, channel) because you wouldn't get reaonable SNR trying to share them, more flex cables, more of those nasty suspension systems, arm motors, etc. You could share the backend of the uprocessor (although it'd require a serious upgrade of the processors we use now since none of them have the umph to do a read and servo calcs at the same time), buffer RAM (although you'd need an increase in that, too, to handle two streams), motor driver, platter, motor, and the controller, but other than that you need to replicate many very expensive parts again. I'd guess you'd increase the cost by 50% or more. The idea's floated around the industry before and prototypes have been built, but in the end the performance boost for the cost wasn't there and no such drive had made it into production.

WD made the bigger buffer because it was cheap. Adding RAM isn't hard and with RAM prices its cheap. Doubling the front end is a nasty, expensive business.

this is somewhat misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Connor's drive also only wrote from one head.

But more importantly, the 4 9GB drives=1 36GB drive thing is misleading. The reason to put multiple heads on is primarily to reduce latency. It cuts latency in half.

To show this we ignore tracks (seeks) for the moment. Any one sector can be anywhere from under the head right now to having just passed the head, in which case it will be a full rotation before it passes again. In the right under case the latency is 0, if it has to go a full rotation it is 1/120th of a second (8ms) on a 7200rpm drive away. On average, you can assume the sector is 1/2 the way around the disk from here for an average rotational latency of 4ms on a 7200rpm drive.

If you have 4 drives, the average sector is still half a rotation away on the drive it is located on, physics says so. If you have 4 heads though, the head can take no longer than 1/4 rotation and will on average be 1/8th rotation away. This is an average rotation latency of 1/2ms for a 4 head 7200rpm drive.

Thus 4 drives striped together do not reduce latency, but 4 heads on 1 drive do.

Note that when you stripe drives together you will actually increase latency if you don't spindle lock them together. This is because you must wait until the sectors you want (they are split up between drives) ALL pass under the heads. Thus your latency is equal to the worst latency of your multiple drives. Striping makes latency worse if you don't spindle lock.

In summary, having two heads reduces latency by half. Doubling the rotational speed (15,000rpm drive) does also. Finally, mirroring all the data across two drives and spindle locking them so they are 180 degress out of phase also has the same effect on read latency.

Re:What would be the input route?

[timecop]

I am not sure how many of you haven't noticed this, but how exactly is this different from "chattr +i" for stopping a casual hax0r?

Your average idiot will try to delete stuff, and fail, your above-average l33t d00d will go for the read/write server anyway.

And as someone said earlier, most of "them" will want to READ data as opposed to deleting or modifying it anyway.

Of course, this coming from a Japanese company with a utterly HORRIBLE webpage, I don't think this is going anywhere.

Re:Snake Oil

[timecop]

IDE cable length is what, 18 centimeters? Good luck putting a "server" machine close enough while keeping the IDE cable distances.

Re:Hey before you go out and buy one

[Christopher Biggs]

That (disconnecting the ATA write line) won't work, because you won't be able to send commands to the drive.