But at more than twice the cost of a secure mechanical hard drive, such as Apricorn’s own Padlock Fortress, it’s not an impulse buy. The Aegis Padlock SSD offers unique blend of security, capacity, small size, performance, and ease of use. Crystal DiskMark ranked the drive slightly faster than that. Aegis Secure Key 3.0 Brings a World of Advanced Data Protection Easy to use FIPS 140-2 Level 3 (pending) USB 3.0 flash drive with on-the-fly AES hardware. Speeds jumped to 182MBps and 152MBps respectively with a single large 10GB file. But being an SSD with a USB 3.0 interface, the Padlock performed quite well, reading our 10GB mix of files and folders at 109MBps and writing them at 75MBps. You won’t get state-of-the-art performance with any secure drive, as it takes time to encrypt during writes and decrypt it during reads. The Aegis Padlock SSD secures your data using 256-bit AES-EXT encryption, so it’s not as fast as an unencrypted drive. My only gripe with the Aeigis Padlock SSD is that it doesn’t have a battery–it requires USB power and its stubby cable renders it slightly ungainly to unlock if, for instance, it’s hanging off the side of your display.

Unlock, held simultaneously with various numbers, allows you to perform admin chores such as adding secondary users.

Subsequently you simply press the unlock key and enter the PIN to access the drive. The drive ships locked, requiring the definition of an administrative PIN (multiple users are allowed).

You lock and unlock the Padlock using a keypad on the top of the device.

Aegis thumb drive