Amacom ezSecure review

If there's one area where some government departments demonstrate a remarkable efficiency it has to be their ability to lose sensitive data. If it must be transported on USB devices it should be secured and devices such as Amacom's ezSecure means there are no excuses.

This chunky retro aluminium case has a LCD touch-screen with a numeric keypad used to secure the drive. The default PIN is six digits but you can change to a PIN of up to twelve digits. There's more as the drive can be secured so even if it's removed from the casing the contents will be inaccessible.

The drive comes with a USB cable with a pair of standard plugs at one end so if one host USB port can't provide enough power you connect the second plug. For testing we linked the ezSecure to a Boston Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon system running Windows Vista and had no problems using a single plug.

To use the drive you enter your PIN and three failed attempts will result in the drive requiring a power cycle. The menu then offers options to connect the drive or go to a setup menu where you can change your PIN and select the secure mode. A backlight would be useful as the screen is difficult to see in low light conditions.

Performance is reasonable with Iometer reporting read and write speeds of 34MB/sec and 23MB/sec. This translated well to real world testing as copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned read and write speeds of 29MB/sec and 23.6MB/sec.

To see whether the security worked we set the drive to unsecured mode, removed it from the case and fitted it to our test server via its SATA interface where it was identified as a standard drive with all its contents on display. We then popped it back in its case, activated the secure mode, removed it and put it back in the test server. This time the system picked it up as an unknown drive that required initialising and formatting thus confirming our test data was inaccessible.

You are paying for the privilege and performance is modest, but the biggest problem for Amacom is that it has stiff competition in the form of Lenovo's rival secure hard drive.

Author: Dave Mitchell