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Review: Lenovo ThinkPad USB Secure Hard Drive

Lenovo's secure hard drive, with automatic, built-in encryption, ensures that even if it goes missing, no perp is going to be able to rifle through your digital possessions.
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Rating:

7/10

WIRED
320 gigs of storage for your sensitive data, secured with NSA-level encryption — you can't so much as view a thumbnail without punching the proper numerical code into the keypad. Sturdy build.
TIRED
Setting up and changing pass codes is a chore. Disconnecting drive is tricky on some operating systems (cough, Vista, cough). Wildly expensive compared with regular drives of similar capacity — but if you need this much security, MI5 is probably footing the bill.

You can never have too much storage capacity. For years, external USB hard drives have been the cheap, portable, and convenient answer for people looking to goose their gigabytes without cracking open their computers. But while external USB drives are handy, they're also unfortunately and notoriously insecure. It's all too simple for a thief to grab a USB drive off a desk or out of a bag and quickly disappear. With a smaller-size drive, the loss may go unnoticed for days, which is plenty of time for a perp to rifle through your digital possessions.

Lenovo offers one solution to protecting your data even if the hard drive goes missing: The USB Secure Hard Drive includes automatic, built-in encryption that requires no additional set-up on your end. You don't even need software to unlock the drive's data. Just punch your six-digit key into the keypad right on top of the drive and you can access its contents. If someone doesn't know the key and tries to use the device, Windows won't even recognize that the drive exists.