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At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, LG and Nero unveiled their SecurDisc technology. This hardware and software based solution not only prevents unauthorized access to data, it increases reliability through a redundancy-based defect management system. To give you an idea of what to expect from SecurDisc, I've put together a short article. This article not only gives an overview of the technology, it goes through the process of writing and reading a disc protected by SecurDisc. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in the forum.

Thanks for trying this out, Ian.

There may be some professional use for this system- but apart from your remarks about the (non)encrypted file list, I noticed this in your report:

you will need to install a compatible version of InCD or InCD Reader.

So I assume that this system is based on packet writing. I've heard too many horror stories about that to take it seriously.

Another aspect that I (personally) don't like is that the name seems to continue the ambiguity of terms that is present in "trusted computimg" (or whatever it's called now). "Secure" means both
- access restriction
- enhanced data integrity through redundancy.

For personal use, it'd be nice to have the latter only- might even make packet writing palatable.

G

Great article!

Awesome file names in your data disc compilation! Although, I did have a bit of trouble reading them due to the compressed image.

Personally, I'd like to see a way to hide them, at least until a password has been entered.

I agree, it would be very nice to be able to hide the file names and information. As a workaround, files can be added to an archive (ZIP) before burning, which would hide the individual file names.

@MediumRare, I do not believe that SecurDisc uses any packet writing technology. I think that Nero just bundled the SecurDisc read features in with the InCD reader to keep down the number of "reader" apps that they distribute.

Also, you can choose to use only the "enhanced data integrity" feature and not the encryption feature as shown in the screenshots (Digitally sign disc checkbox).

It uses UDF for the filesystem. I'm guessing they've modified it somewhat though.

Personally, I don't have the need to password protect my data, but the redundancy stuff will definitely come in handy when doing data backups.

I didn't mention this in the review, but I've seen a few places report that LG would be adding SecurDisc to some of their older models. I believe the GSA-H22N/L and GSA-H42N/L were a few that were mentioned. According to my contact at LG, they are NOT planning on doing this.

Now what would be nice is to see if the protection really works.
It's not the first time that something like is announced and the actuall protection system could be pulled of as a marketing gimmick for which people are paying a way to high price.