External storage specialist LaCie has announced its latest portable hard drive, which brings 128-bit encryption hardware and biometric authentication technology to your data storage.
Dubbed the Rugged Safe, LaCie’s latest bus-powered 2.5 inch portable hard drive certainly seems to live up to its name: a shock-proof, rubberized exterior hides a 500GB 2.5 inch hard drive mounted on four independent suspensions to minimize the possibility of damage from a drop – because, let’s face it, half a terabyte is a lot of data to lose just because you’re clumsy.
Interestingly, the Rugged Safe is both Mac and PC compatible, featuring USB 2.0 and Firewire as connection options – and the drive can draw power from either, meaning no mains adapter is ever required no matter which platform you plan to use the device on.
So far, so rugged hard drive – but it’s the cryptography aspect that makes the Rugged Safe special. Inside the drive itself is an encryption chip which scrambles the data as it is written to the disk with a 128-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm. This encrypted data is then decrypted on-the-fly by the drive as it is read – meaning it’s completely transparent to the user. As algorithms go, AES is pretty secure – having been chosen by the US government as the replacement for the aging DES, or Data Encryption Standard.
Rather than requiring a passphrase to get at your scrambled data, however, LaCie has opted to equip the Rugged Safe with a fingerprint reader – providing biometric access to the decryption system. If your fingerprint isn’t registered, you won’t be able to read the data.
LaCie has considered the possibility of shared drives in households when it was developing the biometric authentication technology for the Rugged Safe, and has opted to allow up to ten individuals to register as users on the drive – although if you want to share between eleven or more souls you’re out of luck.
Erwan Girad, LaCie’s business unit manager, describes the device as having been “developed to enable professional or private users to protect their valuable data and intellectual property from theft and unauthorized access,” and claims that the Rugged Safe is “the safest and most mobile storage solution – a real vault for your data.”
The Rugged Safe is available now at a suggested retail price of $189.99, and comes with a three year warranty – along with a free copy of LaCie Backup Assistant software for both Windows and Mac OS.
