When you attach it and enter the password, you unlock the drive, and it operates as any other drive. When the drive is unattached to a computer, it is locked and generally secured with XTS-AES full-disk encryption. Keypad-equipped drives, for one, are platform-independent, require no software to run, and can work with almost any computer as long as it has a USB port.
You can also find drives with a secure physical layer. Physical Drive Security: Keypads, Fingerprint Scanners, and More And even if your drive lacks native encryption, there are many encryption utilities you can install to make your files unreadable (and, in many cases, invisible) to others. That should give you an idea of how ironclad AES encryption is, at least in the face of a brute-force attack.Įncrypted mainstream external drives often let users create a password-protected vault into which they can drop files or folders to be encrypted (by AES or other methods). Using brute-force methods-say, a supercomputer trying one key after another in an effort to decrypt it-could take an average of many trillions of years to break it-far longer than the current age of the universe. It takes the data through multiple permutation rounds in the encryption process. Even the standard 256-bit AES encryption (which uses a 256-bit key) is essentially uncrackable. Most mainstream encrypted SSDs and hard drives provide what's known as AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption, while most hyper-secure keypad-accessible drives utilize XTS-AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption.įor good reason, AES is considered the gold standard in drive encryption. A Guide to Hardware-Based EncryptionĮncryption is the process of taking readable text or data and encoding it using a key-a random string of bits, generated by an encryption algorithm-so that only someone in possession of the key can decrypt it. Read on for our lab-tested favorites, followed by information about the different types of secure and encrypted drives you might encounter and their features. We've outlined below our top picks among the encrypted hard drives we've tested.
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