If someone broke into your office and steal your computer , would you be more implicated about the cost of replacing your hardware or the complications arising from the loss of tender data ? If you pick out the latter , Rocsecure ’s Rocbit 3B desktop hard drives may be just what you necessitate .

Holding the solidly work up Rocbit 3 ’s 2.6 - Syrian pound aluminum enclosure imparts confidence . The Rocbit 3 is available in several different configurations , offering you a option of encryption level ( 40- , 64- , 128- , or 192 - bit ) , capacity ( 80 to 750 GB ) , cache size , and routine and case of ports on the back . We reviewed the 40 - bit , 500 GB , 16 megabit hoard Rocbit 3B with two FireWire 800 port and one USB 2.0 port . The drive add up with an AC adapter and USB and FireWire cables .

To expend the drive , you introduce the small Secure Key into a special port on the back of the drive , then format using Apple ’s Disk Utility ( you do this only once ) . After the intensity climb , you could withdraw the key and use the ride until you turn the world power off , at which point you must reinsert the inviolable Key before Mac OS X can agnize the drive . This approach to protection is much good than own to memorize passwords , but it would be more convenient if the Secure Key port were on the front of the whole , near the course of LED indicators , which , incidentally , are difficult to take at an angle .

Rocbit 3 deliver encryption via a flake on the comptroller that intercepts IDE ( Integrated Drive Electronics ) data bid to the driving and encrypts the data using DES ( Data Encryption Standard ) algorithms in real time , with no performance penalization . And you wo n’t compromise security by moving the mechanism to a different enclosure , as is possible with arduous drives that memory board data in unencrypted cleartext . But , if you drop off your keys , you fall back your data — and you must ordain a Seth of replacement key to reformat your drive .

Once mounted , the Rocbit behaves like any other Mac volume , and it is virtually silent , even during phonograph record action . In Macworld ’s standard hard drive tests , the Rocbit 3B was anywhere from 10 per centum slower to 10 per centum quicker than the norm of five traditional bombastic - electrical capacity drives from other vendors . The speed difference of opinion are n’t something you ’ll remark without a stop watch and should n’t weigh heavily in your buying conclusion .

timed trials

shell = Minutes : Seconds

How We Tested : We ladder all tests with the FireWire drives connect to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.9 installed and 512 megabyte of RAM . We test the drive using FireWire 800 . ( In cases where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we use FireWire 400 . ) We copied a folder take 1 GB of data from our Mac ’s hard drive to the external intemperate private road to test the drive ’s write speed . We then duplicate that single file on the external drive to test both interpret and save speeds . We also used the private road as a boodle disk when running our low - memory Adobe Photoshop CS Suite test . This test is a set of four tasks perform on a 150 M file , with Photoshop ’s memory set to 50 percent.—Macworld Lab Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung

specifications

Macworld’s buying advice

If security is important to you , the Rocbit 3B with 40 - bit encryption is easy worth the damage over like desktop drives ( the 192 - bit model be almost $ 200 more than similar models ) . If you need encryption on the go , then consider the portable Rocbit 2 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 ) . ]