As people constantly on the move, we're always concerned
about how to safely carry around important digital files, conscious of what
might happen should we lose them and they fall into the wrongs hands. Granted,
our important data is a spreadsheet of Brian Blessed quotes and bunch of fan art
from Community, but still... wouldn't want a Russian spy nabbing them, would
we? If your data is a little bit more important, then perhaps you need a flash
drive that not just anyone can get access to. You need the datAshur SSD Flash
Drive.
This is our third look at a flash drive from encryption
experts iStorage, and each time previously we've been very impressed. The datAshur
SSD Flash Drive is similar in appearance to the datAshur Secure flash drive,
which was one of the first gadgets we ever reviewed a few years back.
Basically you have a USB flash drive
that requires a keycode to access the data onboard. Get the code wrong a few
times, and the drive automatically wipes itself clean.
So if you carry around extremely important information on a
flash drive, be it customer information or the top secret plans to a weapon
that can evaporate the oceans in the blink of an eye, only you can access it by
entering the correct code. So pretty much the same as before. So what's the
difference? By God, it is capacity.
We were previously wowed by the 8GB version of the datAshur,
but as the addition of 'SSD' suggests, things have improved. The iStorage datAshur
SSD Flash Drive comes in 30, 60, 120 or 240 gigabyte versions! We were
massively impressed by this, not just because you can, therefore, keep safe an
entire computer's worth of data protected while on the go, but because the
package it all comes in is so small, light, and slim (not to mention water and
dust resistant thanks to the aluminium sleeve).
It works with any USB device, not just Macs and PCs, and doesn't
require a software driver to be on the device first. Nor do you have to wait to
plug it in before you can enter your eight digit code, as the datAshur SSD
Flash Drive has its own battery. You simply enter your code, and then you have
a limited amount of time to plug it into a USB port before the drive locks once
more, requiring you to enter you code again. It will also automatically lock
once the drive is pulled from the port (or after a pre-set amount of time)
meaning that even if some cheeky tea-leaf were to snatch your flash drive
straight from the computer, they still wouldn't be able to get to the data
without the code. Nice try, Russia.
But the really remarkable thing about the datAshur SSD Flash
Drive is the choice of huge capacities. Obviously you'll be paying top whack
for the device, even at the lower end of sizes, but for businesses whose
workers need to carry sensitive materials around with them, protecting the data
on one of these could save a lot of bother (and money) should it ever get lost.
30GB £159
60GB £199
120GB £229
240GB £299
