report of corporal employees losing laptops full of sensitive customer data have become a staple of the nightly news program . Rocsecure ’s Rocbit 2B portable hard drive , featuring existent - metre encoding , may make such security breaches a thing of the past .
value 5.7 - by-3.5 - by-0.83 inches , the Rocbit 2 ’s sturdy 0.6 - Ezra Pound aluminum natural enclosure is small and wanton enough not to saddle mobile exploiter . The Rocbit 2 is usable in several unlike model , tell apart by the encoding level ( 40- , 64- , 128- , or 192 - fleck ) , capacity ( 40 to 160 GB ) , rotational speed , and turn and type of interface available . I review the 40 - act , 100 GB , 5,400 - rpm Rocbit 2B with two FireWire 800 port and one USB 2.0 interface . You may take the supply AC arranger when connect the drive to your computer via USB , but never with FireWire .
To lead off using the cause , you insert the small Secure Key into a special port on the back of the ride , then format using Disk Utility ( you only need to do this once ) . After the volume mounts , you may hit the key and use the drive until you turn off the great power , at which point you must reinsert the good Key before Mac OS X can recognize the ride again . This approach path beat memorizing obtuse passwords or address with biometric guard . It would be more commodious , however , if the safe Key port was on the front .
Encryption is provided via a chip on the driving force ’s control that intercepts IDE ( Integrated Drive Electronics ) data control to the drive and encrypts the data using DES ( Data Encryption Standard ) algorithmic rule in genuine clock time , with no public presentation penalty . Security ca n’t be compromised by only moving the mechanism to a new inclosure , as is possible with hard effort that store datum in unencrypted cleartext . Of naturally , if you drop off your keys , you fall back your data . Under this circumstance , you must dictate a set of replacement keys to reformat your cause with encryption , since it ’s impossible to use the drive as a normal storage gimmick .
Once put on , the Rocbit 2B behaves exactly like any other Mac intensity , and it is sunnily quiet , even during disk activity . In Macworld ’s received hard drive tests , the Rocbit 2B was six to 31 percent quicker than the average of three like drives from other vendor .
timed trials
Scale = Minutes : Seconds
How We examine : We ran all run with the FireWire drives connect to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.9 put in and 512 MB of Aries . We tested the movement using FireWire 800 . ( In cases where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we use FireWire 400 . ) We re-create a folder containing 1 GB of data from our Mac ’s arduous driving to the international gruelling drive to test the drive ’s write fastness . We then duplicate that data file on the external drive to test both read and write speeds . We also used the drive as a pelf disk when running our crushed - memory Adobe Photoshop CS Suite psychometric test . This test is a band of four tasks execute on a 150 MB file , with Photoshop ’s retentivity set to 50 percent.—Macworld research laboratory Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
specifications
Macworld’s buying advice
Rocsecure ’s Rocbit 2B , with 40 - second encryption , is priced a mo gamey than similar unencrypted portable drives and is well worth the premium if security is a concern , but the 192 - bit model costs almost $ 200 more and is for the truly paranoid . If your storage needs exceed 160 GB , count the desktop Rocbit 3B instead (; August 2006 ) .
[ Owen W. Linzmayer is the author ofApple Confidential 2.0 : The Definitive History of the World ’s Most Colorful Company(No Starch Press , 2 ed . , 2004 ) . ]
