I've owned six portable USB hard drives over the past 10 years, and all six of them have failed unrecoverably. Interestingly, the reviewers came up with a wider range of performance numbers than anyone actually expected. The reviewers also looked at the drives' security features, price, ease of installation, and ease of use.Įach device was tested for speed using Simpli Software's Hd Tach 3.0. Our three reviewers - Bill O'Brien, Rich Ericson and Lucas Mearian - did not test the encryption algorithms themselves (that's a subject for another article), but did test the drives' performance, I/O rates, and CPU utilization. (For more information, see our sidebar About Encryption.)
There was some variation in the implementation of the encryption on these drives - some use AES keys derived from a user's password, while others use encryption keys generated by a hardware-based random number generator. All but one of these products use some form of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, either 128-bit or 256-bit (according to experts, there's not much of a difference between 128-bit and 256-bit levels of AES encryption for ordinary purposes, as neither has yet been broken). We did what most IT managers and users would do and asked some of the top vendors for their most secure USB flash drives.
As a result, Computerworld decided it was time to look at seven USB flash drives that are outfitted with security features to keep your data safe.
In fact, the question to ask these days isn't how to avoid losing your flash drive, but how to make sure your data is safe when you do. USB flash drives are very small, very portable, very convenient - and very easy to lose.
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