Apricorn Aegis Vault

Apricorn's Aegis Vault encrypted hard drive sports a convenient built-in USB cable.

Recently we looked at eight different encrypted portable drives, and Apricorn's Aegis Vault landed in the middle, in fourth place.

Take the company's Aegis Bio (our second-place choice) and remove its fingerprint reader, and you have the Aegis Vault ($260 for 500GB). The two models are virtually identical, but in this case you must submit a password to unlock the drive.

In many respects the Aegis Vault is a decent, slightly pricier duplicate of Seagate's Maxtor BlackArmor (our Best Buy pick) and its basic features, but with a convenient built-in USB cable.

source : www.pcworld.com

Data Locker 250GB Pro AES Edition

The touch-screen controls on the Data Locker Pro encrypted drive look like a gimmick, but they make common tasks far easier.

In our recent look at eight encrypted portable drives, we considered several models that require Windows for log-in, setup, and maintenance. If you want to use an encrypted drive on several computers with different OSs, you need a way to enter a password through something other than Windows software. That's where the Data Locker Pro AES ($340 for 320GB) and its touch-screen LCD come in.

The Data Locker gives you a numeric keypad for entering a six-digit passcode that lets the drive mount in an operating system. You can also use the LCD screen to change the passcode, dismount the drive, toggle the encryption on or off, or wipe the drive clean. One annoyance, however, is the loud beeping that it emits when you press the screen (and you can't turn the sound off).

The Data Locker's relatively high price factors in the cost of the additional hardware, but the touch screen is definitely slick, and this drive is worth considering if you need to move sensitive data between machines.

source : www.pcworld.com