South Carolina Computer Crime Center Gets New Tool for Handling Volumes of Digital Evidence

The South Carolina Computer Crime Center, a cooperative effort between the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), the United States Secret Service and the FBI, has chosen Hitachi Data Systems to consolidate and improve access to digital evidence.

The South Carolina Computer Crime Center, which opened in December 2002, handles the forensic examination of evidence collected during the investigation of computer crimes in South Carolina. Soon after it opened, the facility was faced with a rapidly growing volume of digital evidence and needed a highly scalable storage solution that would leverage the Center's existing infrastructure.

"Our evidence repository has been growing dramatically and we were forced to continuously purchase hard drives to store extremely large image files," said Walker Johnson, information resource consultant, South Carolina Computer Crime Center. "We were using 176 IDE hard drives to meet our storage needs, and needed to simplify the management of our data. Many of them were 80-gigabyte Western Digital drives that were resident in IDE drive trays. Thunder 9570V makes a huge difference because it provides the performance we require and the scalability to keep up with our expanding data needs."

Using Thunder 9570V storage system, the Crime Center brings together investigators and forensics experts to effectively solve computer crimes. From the Center's single location, investigators recover and analyze evidence in high technology crimes related to credit card fraud, pornography, and security breaches within corporations. This solution also enables investigators to perform deep searches to recover e-mail and deleted file evidence.

"The South Carolina Computer Crime Center is the focal point in our state for a number of local, state and federal computer crime taskforce efforts," said Lt. Chip Johnson, supervisory special agent, South Carolina Computer Crime Center. "Hitachi Data Systems' storage solution allows investigators to work on multiple cases at once and to more quickly access forensic images of evidence. The increase in productivity allows investigators to rapidly solve computer crimes and ensure criminals are where they belong -- behind bars."

Since the fault tolerant, high-speed Hitachi Data Systems storage solution was installed, the time required to electronically search an imaged hard drive was rapidly lowered from up to 24 hours to 1-2 hours. IT managers and system administrators at the South Carolina Computer Crime Center also benefit from the business continuity features of the system. Furthermore, the system's software allows virtually instant single-command data restoration while Hitachi Resource Manager enables administrators to manage the Thunder 9570V system.