Software

Hardware

Software does not usually offer compression. The maximum speed achievable will be the native transfer rate of the drive as the drive will not be able to compress the encrypted data.

The Paranoia2 family and SafeTape units use hardware compression prior to encryption so the effective transfer rates are maintained or improved upon.

Software compression relies upon the system processing power to do the work, this means the speed is dependent on the available power and affected by other processes running on the system.

Hardware compression is not system reliant and the transfer rates and backup times are able to be calculated.

Software normally involves several updates during the life of the system.

Hardware does not change even if the complete system or OS is changed.

Software encryption is not available for all systems

Hardware encryption works on all system types.

Some backup packages do not include encryption so requiring a change of package and the associated configuration, set up and training times to learn the new packages.

Hardware encryption works on all backup packages without the need for any changes of configuration

With software encryption the user key is kept on the system so is liable to attack across the system or network.

With hardware tape encryption the key is kept in the Paranoia and cannot be read from any external device.

Software is normally restricted to a single operating system type.

Hardware is system independent so the same hardware can be used across many different platforms and operating system

Software encryption usually needs to be upgraded (i.e. purchased again) when the OS is upgraded

Hardware being platform independent does not need to be changed ( i.e. no cost!)

Software is often low cost

Hardware is the same cost whatever the OS so may appear expensive on small systems and less so on the larger ones.

Software costs are often based on the capacity of the attached library, if the library is upgraded you often need to pay again for the software upgrade

Hardware costs are fixed, whatever the size of the library or the amount of data to be protected