Encrypted Drives Keep Your Files Safe
By now, the horror stories about missing external hard drives holding sensitive information have lost their edge. Whenever I hear that another 20,000 customers of some company are at risk of identity theft, I just roll my eyes. Yes, it's irresponsible for businesses, universities, and government agencies to lose so much. But it's also understandable: Until recently, encrypting data on a hard drive was a cumbersome process.
Now, external hard drives can take care of the encryption for you. They obviate sophisticated software, and assume the heavy lifting from the PC. Hardware-encrypted drives offer a performance boost over encryption that relies on software running on Windows. Whereas software asks the PC's CPU to do the number-crunching, encrypted drives use special processors, built into their housing, that scramble data as it's written to disk. Seagate's Maxtor BlackArmor puts the chip on the hard drive's circuitry, in what's called full-disk encryption. (Full-disk-encryption drives are popular in corporate laptops, but are just now becoming widely available as external units.)
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