The BlackArmor encrypted hard drive is tops for its intuitive out-of-the-box experience, good utilities bundle, and reasonable price.

The Seagate Maxtor BlackArmor ($135 for 320GB) is a marvel of simplicity. It's the first external hard drive with full-disk encryption--the encryption chip resides on the hard drive's circuitry. According to Seagate, all of the data is encrypted on the drive, so even if someone removes the drive from the housing and takes away the chip set, the data is inaccessible. When you first attach the BlackArmor to a Windows PC, the drive loads a read-only partition with the setup software. Initializing the drive and setting a password takes only a minute, after which the drive loads the encrypted partition and Windows shows it as a drive letter. Thereafter, every time you plug in the drive, the autorun settings will ask you to enter the password.

The BlackArmor also features a Secure Erase option (which overwrites data areas of the drive with zeroes), as well as a backup utility.

In our recent look at encrypted portable drives, we chose this model as our Best Buy for its value--it offers one of the best cost-per-gigabyte rates we've seen--as well as for its simplicity and its full-disk-encryption security.

source : PCWORLD

In our recent look at eight encrypted portable drives, we considered two USB flash drives, including SanDisk's Cruzer Contour.

The Cruzer Contour ($100 for 16GB) isn't so much a security tool as it is a speedy flash-memory thumb drive with a nifty mechanism to retract the USB connector: The piece recesses inside a sliding cover that you can manipulate with just your thumb. Inside, it's a high-performance U3 drive with all the benefits: the ability to run programs from the drive itself, a feature that stores your documents on the drive automatically, and the U3 Launchpad, a clone of the Start menu for the drive's installed applications.

In the Launchpad menu is the check box to "lock" the AES-encrypted user-writable portion of the drive with a password. While the protection isn't enabled by default, it can put a password between anyone who finds your lost drive and your files. As long as the NSA isn't after your data, this setup will probably provide enough security for casual use.

For our recent look at eight encrypted portable drives, we considered two USB flash models, one of which was Kingston's DataTraveler Vault--Privacy Edition.

The DataTraveler Vault--Privacy Edition ($173 for 4GB) is a good but pricey option for anyone who needs an encrypted drive small enough to wear around the neck. A blue, metallic tube with a cap on one end, it's among the bulkier USB models we've seen. But what's inside is what counts: This drive's embedded encryption engine scrambles data with a 256-bit AES encryption key--a key that's twice as long as what other products offer. The longer key means thieves must take that much more time to try to crack the encryption.

Like Seagate's Maxtor BlackArmor drive (our number one pick among the eight we tested), the DataTraveler opens its utilities in a read-only partition that Windows interprets as a CD-ROM drive. Once you have created your password, the drive mounts the encrypted partition.