$83,500... Wow... Congrats to HP if they manage to sell 10 of these... since they appear to have an artificial 10000% markup over their actual (current) value.

How does the encryption add-on work when encryption is already built into HP LTO4 drives, do they disable it and then enable it again?

It was either!

A) installed but not activated. You pay a premium to get the encryption up and running

B) LTO encryption was based on the Caeser cypher, and you pay to get an AES-256 upgrade.

Like when HP sold minisystems fully specced, but you would pay an extra "rental" free to activate another processor or more RAM for the monthly pay runs for example... or IBM selling you a processor + field engineer time to install it when it was already there, just needing to be turned on by the correct DIP switch sequence under the lid on mainframes...

I find that the physical medium CANNOT keep up when running the encyption on only one of my CPUs.

What is it about HP gear that they have to offload the encyption task?

Unless I'm mistaken, LTO-4 uses AES256-GCM encryption by default.

I'd think the reason they offload it to another system is security related. If the keys don't exist in memory accessible to the operating systems processor it would make them much more difficult to compromise.

I could be wrong and they could just inflating the price by providing a hardware solution.

Brandon,

If the memory of the process with the data is readable then data you are attempting to protect is readable.

Since it needs to be readable in one spot, why push it out to an external interface in that same readable format?

Especially if the data is so important that it needs to be copied offsite to allow for recovery.