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These devices can eliminate a lot of security worries, but they can’t prevent careless behavior.Ĭonsult our chart of encrypted portable drives for a quick specs comparison, and turn to the next page to read my impressions of all eight drives.

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That is, of course, assuming you haven’t attached the password to the drive on a sticky note, or left the decryption key plugged into the back. Regardless of which model you choose, if you inadvertently leave the drive holding all the nuclear secrets behind on the train, you can be confident that the schmo who finds it won’t be able to retrieve them.

My pick for Best Buy is the Seagate Maxtor BlackArmor. I evaluated eight models, including hard drives and flash drives. Less common are drives that use the older DES (Digital Encryption Standard), or its cousin, Triple-DES–both are significantly weaker algorithms, though they’re effective if you’re simply trying to prevent casual snooping. Level 1, the lowest of four levels, basically means “no glaring errors or omissions were present.” Anything that uses AES-128 or -256 is FIPS 140-2 Level 1 compliant. FIPS 140 is a very general government encryption standard that ensures that products follow certain security protocols. The most common is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), which several branches of the federal government and the military use. Most encrypted drives use one of several standard, well-known algorithms. Even if someone tries removing the platters (or memory chips) from the housing and scanning them with forensic data-recovery tools, the recorded bits will appear to be random garbage data, unlockable only with the right key. (Full-disk-encryption drives are popular in corporate laptops, but are just now becoming widely available as external units.)Īs with all encrypted drives, the data on the platters (or, in the case of flash drives, on the memory chip) is unreadable to anyone–short of cryptanalysts who work for certain three-letter government agencies–who lacks the password or the physical key. Seagate’s Maxtor BlackArmor puts the chip on the hard drive’s circuitry, in what’s called full-disk encryption.

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Whereas software asks the PC’s CPU to do the number-crunching, encrypted drives use special processors, built into their housing, that scramble data as it’s written to disk. Hardware-encrypted drives offer a performance boost over encryption that relies on software running on Windows.

They obviate sophisticated software, and assume the heavy lifting from the PC. Now, external hard drives can take care of the encryption for you.

But it’s also understandable: Until recently, encrypting data on a hard drive was a cumbersome process. Yes, it’s irresponsible for businesses, universities, and government agencies to lose so much. Whenever I hear that another 20,000 customers of some company are at risk of identity theft, I just roll my eyes. By now, the horror stories about missing external hard drives holding sensitive information have lost their edge.