Secure portable hard drives

I love cool new technology that solves problems. Here has been my problem:

As a guy who is really into redundancy and really into backups, I never leave the office without without a working backup copy of my laptop hard drive. This is a good thing and has saved me a number of times, but also poses a really big security problem.

Where my laptop is password protected and has the hardware firmware enabled, so it is relatively secure if it ever gets snatched, that portable hard drive I carry as a backup is not. It is wide open and easy prey if it ever gets lost or stolen. Where you can use Filevault or other security methods to encrypt the contents of the drive, it prevents it from being bootable, which is one of the things I need in case my main drive in the laptop goes belly-up.

There is a new solution out there that solves this problem. It is currently marketed by Lenovo (yeah, the ThinkPad folks.) It is called the USB Secure Hard Drive. It comes in 160 gb and 320 gb flavors and is not altogether unreasonably priced.

I know, I know, it is only USB2 and not firewire, but I have to let you in on a little secret. I bought one of the new MacBooks and love it and I am actually doing pretty well sans firewire. Buy if you are running 10.5 you can boot up from a USB drive anyways, firewire or not. And now you can do it securely so what could be better than that?

How it works:

You plug it in to your computer, a little red light turns on next to the keypad on the drive. You enter your password and hit the unlock button and the light turns green the drive mounts and you are good to go. Without the password, you can't mount the drive. Since it is a hardware solution, you can pull the drive out of the case and put it in another case and it still won't work. Without the password the data on the drive can't be accessed.

HA! Take that bad guy who steals my drive!


Ohhhhh I love cool new stuff that solves problems.