Apricorn Aegis Portable 3 - 256 GB

Disclaimer: Apricorn provided the review unit to the author for testing and review. Also be aware that Apricorn has no input into the content of this, or any other review.

Categories of accessories are pretty well established these days now that computing is a mature platform. When thinking of external storage that gets plugged into a USB port, on the one hand we have the small flash drive. It is light and portable, but limited by the capacity. On the other hand we have an external hard drive. These devices offer high capacity, but the trade off is increased weight, a larger size, and they are subject to mechanical failure.

The Aegis Portable 3 fits in neither category, and in fact straddles between these two categories. It is an external drive, that fits into the 2.5" hard drive category, but it is based on an SSD drive (other versions are available with a mechanical hard drive). While it still has the size of an external casing of a notebook hard drive, it gains the advantages of first and foremost speed, and secondarily a lighter weight, and a resilence to falls.

Aegis Secure Key

While we all would like our data to reside in "The Cloud," the reality for most of us is that our data is on a USB flash drive. When I look at my own data flow, I see 14 gigs of data, being used across no less than nine computers- five at home, and four at work. For the stuff I am actually working on, it is simply impossible to have it reside on one computer, and the flash drive is what makes this work pattern possible.

However, with that much data, some of it is bound to be sensitive stuff that is not for sharing. While I have never lost a flash drive, I know plenty of others that have, and in the end they are an accident waiting to happen.

Enter the Aegis Secure Key USB flash drive. This is the drive that purports to allow a user to have their flash drive, while having it secure if found. Security is provided via a ten key numeric keypad. The Secure Key ships with a default PIN, and it is a simple two minute process to customize the PIN to a new one from 7 to 15 numbers long. It also forces a random one for the "security lazy" as it will not allow a simple repeating PIN such as "44444444," or a simple progression such as "12345678."