Imation Defender H200 +BioExternal HDD

According to a survey conducted by PCQuest recentlyof mid-sized enterprises, security was the second keytechnology on their deployment priority list. One ofthe most common ways of information theft is from theportable USB storage devices that are carried around by em-ployees. That's why most organizations prohibit the use ofsuch storage devices. This can become inconvenient, espe-cially when people have to share large files with each other,and they're in a place where the local network is inaccessible.That's where the Imation Defender H200+Bio can be a goodoption. Defender H200 utilizes biometric capabilities throughan ergonomic swipe sensor with hardware-based matching.The registered user of the drive can authenticate his fingerprint and access the drive from any Windows or Mac OS systems.

The device has in-built Defender ACCESS software thatcan be used to personalize and manage the device. For thefirst time as an administrator you can set a number of usersand their biometric authentication and passwords. You canalso set the number of password or biometric retry limit, after which the user is blocked. Then administrator of the device can rescue the blocked user. Also, there is a featureof 'Data Destruction', so that if its turned on and the user gets blocked, then the data in the drive is destroyed automatically. This is useful to avoid information from being leaked.When the Defender H200 is plugged in any Windows or Mac system, it shows a drive partition named 'Locked' having nothing in it. Un-til the registered userswipes his finger to au-thenticate himself thedevice's partition re-mains locked. Upon suc-cessful authenticationthe locked partition isopened and the user canread write data into the drive.The device has ded-icated cryptographicprocessor that delivers AES 256-bit encryption of data storedinto the drive.

Performance

When data security is of prime importance performance cantake a back foot. We created a user in this drive on a Windows7 machine and copied a few files into it. Then we plugged thedrive in a Mac OS X based machine. The machine showed thelocked drive, which got unlocked seamlessly immediately afterthe user authenticated with his fingerprint.

To check its secu-rity, we even tried opening it on a Linux (Ubuntu) based ma-chine. We found that upon plugging in, the drive did show upas locked, and even opened after we did a fingerprint authenti-cation, but we couldn't view its contents as it was encrypted.To check data transfer speeds, we attached thedrive to an AMD Phenom II X4 2.60 GHz basedWindows 7 machine with 4GB RAM. The driveclocked an average transfer speed of 15 MB/s and18.7ms access time on HD Tune benchmark, whiletransferring 1GB data from PC to drive took 1min9 seconds and for reverse it took 28 seconds.

BOTTOMLINE: The drive has excellent data secu-rity features and is ideal for corporate mobileusers for preventing data theft unwillingly from their side, but price is on higher side.