Lenovo ThinkPad Secure Portable Hard Drive Review

The Lenovo ThinkPad Portable USB hard driveoffers aunique methodfor storing data in a 128-bit secure manner while you're on the go. Using a physical keypad style input, the data on this portable hard drive can only be accessed after you punch in the right number code. If you don't have the code, you can't access the drive or its data. For business users whose lost or stolen data can cost a companythousands of dollars, the ThinkPad portable hard driveis certainly an interesting device.

These days there are a lot of options for portable storage devices that can be easily carried along with your notebook.Depending on your needs you could go with a64GB USB flash drive, 32GB SD card, or alarger capacity portable hard drive offering upwards of 250GB in storage. Storage capacity and form factor are certainly important decisions when it comes to selecting a portable storage format, but what is often overlooked is the datasecurity offered for these various storage devices. Price Waterhouse Coopers recently estimated that asingle incident of lost data on average costs a company $10,000. Consider that fact and you'll wonder why anybusiness user would use a flash drive for data storage--flash drivesare easier to lose than a sock in the wash. With business users in mind Lenovo designed the ThinkPad portable storage drive as ahighly secure data storagedevice that is hardware encrypted and accessible only via password.

In the box

The ThinkPad USB Portable storage drive comes with the following items in the box:

• ThinkPad Secure Portable hard drive with 128-bit hardware encryption(available in 160GB and 320GB)
  • Weight: 0.69lbs
  • Dimensions: 3.5 inch x 4.8 inch x 0.9inch (width x depth x thickness)
• USB extension cable
• Supplementary USBpower cable
• Neoprene travel case with storage pocket for cables

The ThinkPad portable hard drive is available in either a 160GB or 320GB capacity size, the 160GB version retails for $179 while the 320GB version retails for $219 at Lenovo.com. Our review version is the 320GB size drive.

How it works

Lenovo providestwo USB cables for the portable drive, oneto provide power and the other for data transfer, howeverI found that the just plugging in one cable did both jobs. If your PCis older two cables may be necessary. After connecting the drive to your notebook or desktop PC you simplypunch in thepassword number on the keypad (by default when newit is "123456") and hit the unlock key, after which the drive is unlocked and you can access data like any other drive.There is no special software necessary to install,the hardware is self-reliant and takes care of encrypting and securing your data. If you disconnect the drive from your PC it automatically reverts to encrypting and locking the data.

The operation all sounds very simple until you get tochanging passwords or adding user accounts. To get into the details of how this is done is beyond the scope of this review, but suffice to say you will have to read the user guide (link to ThinkPad Secure portable drive guide) for this device. For instance, if you want to access the admin account and change the password, a necessary action since by default it's "123456", you have to follow such stepsas holding down a button for five seconds, watching for a flashing blue light and then also watching for a green light to flash three times. It's downright cumbersome performing admin related functions with this drive, and I wish there was an option forsome type of software interfaceto makecertain changes.

Design

While design is often an afterthought for portable hard drives, Lenovo actually put a lot ofeffort into the product design. The ThinkPad secure hard drive has a high quality look and feel. It weighs in at about .70lbs and is under an inch thick, small enough to easily carry in one hand. Thecase feels very solid and the drive is shock mounted inside to protect from falls. The case has the same rubberized paint finish as the ThinkPad X300 series of notebooks. The buttons are inset to prevent accidental pushes yet domed enough that they're easy to feel out. Pushing a button gives a satisfying click feedback feel but it is not loud enough to be heard.

On the right side of the drive there is acrannyto tuck away the USB cable. This works well for keeping cable clutter down,but becausethe resulting attached cable is so short Lenovo provided a USB extender cable.

It would have been pretty cool to have a backlight for the keys for use in the dark, but obviously that would be extra cost and power draw.

Performance

The hard drive inside the case spins at a standard 5400RPM. It would have been nice to have a faster 7200RPM drive given the high price of this device, but again that would require more power draw so there's downside involved there. For most peoples needs the 5400RPM drive will be good enough, I moved a 40MB file to the drivein around 3 seconds and a 1.4GB file in 1m 20s. Most business users are just concerned with moving documents and not enormous files, so this is more than acceptable.

Below is a screenshot of HDTune performance for those that are interested in benchmark performance results:

Conclusion

The security features of the ThinkPad portable hard drive are great. Though it's a pain to setup user accounts and passwords for the device, once you're setup there the operation is simple. The automatic 128-bit encryption of all your data via the hardware features keeps the process simple yet ensures your data is secure. The design is pleasing, the product looks and feels very high quality. The price of $219 for the 320GB is about twice what you'll pay for a Western Digital My Passport portable drive of the same capacity, but for business users whose data simply has to be secure oris worth thousands of dollars the extra cost won't be a concern for the extra peace of mind.

Pros

• Keypad password protection provides innovative and easy way to secure data in 128-bit encryption
• Nicely designed drive case with great fit and finish matching the ThinkPad X300
• Travel case for drive and wires is included

Cons

• Entering new users and changing passwords is cumbersome
• Pricey, about twice the cost of a regular portable hard drive

 

Nifty.

Does it have an option to enter a self-destruct code?!

 

neat,

Phinagle, that would be hilarious (yet somehow practical) if it did.

 

You can actually hold in a very complicated button combination to cause it to blast all of the data on the drive (refer to page 9 of the guide). Unfortunately this does not result in any explosions or otherwise cool effect to indicate the data has self destructed.

 

Awwww


I wanted an asplosion.

 

BRILLIANT!
great job lenovo!

one feature missing is a GPS locator, but supplying battery might make the enclosure a bit more bigger.

 

I blame Homeland Security for this thing not packing the pyrotechnics.

You know maybe so but having everything self contained on the device makes it more portable as it can be easily used on any PC with a USB without the need to install software first. Honestly the thing seems only slightly more complicated to program then a universal TV remote but complicated enough that your 2 year old won't accidentally wipe $10K worth of company data.

A software admin interface would also make it easier to crack a password.

That said though I didn't see anything mentioned in the user's guide about what kind of preventions were made to insure the device couldn't be popped open and the standard HDD accessed directly.

Something like this should really use a non-standard form of flash based storage instead of a normal HDD or SSD.

 

The data will be encrypted on the drive so it won't matter if the case is opened.

I like the way this is self-contained, but it seems limited and for niche use only: If the data on the laptop is unencrypted, then that is a security risk. therefore you encrypt the data on the laptop and the encryption on the external drive is redundant-ish. Will the external drives encryption nest EFS encryption? I'm curious whether the external drive was tested like this?

 

Although cool I guess in a sense. Most mid to large biz that I use to consult for have moved away from anything close to "local" storage for their remote users. Usually use term client etc. Lose a laptop no biggy there's no data on it anyway. Replace laptop, have the user use their remote client, say remote desktop and poof there back in biz, even if the laptop isn't even there's they can login and have access to their data. Just something to think about.

Cool review though.
ym

 

This does beat the encrypted flash drives that only work on windows though

looks interesting

 

That's certainly the best solution in terms of data safety, and it works well until you need to make a presentation to a potential million dollar client but can't connect to the Internet to retrieve a Powerpoint presentation and Excel based data you spent 20 hours compiling to help land the deal. So there you are stuck in a room with no visuals or stats to present and go home empty handed without a sale.

There's definitely a balance between protecting data and making it accessible and convenient to retrieve at all times.

 

That use to be true. However now with WiFi and data cards its pretty rare.
its differntly a good point just not much of a issue these days. But was big time say even 3 years ago. These days unlike say even 5 years ago the road beaters are pretty niffty at getting the sale done. None the less there's always
a chance. I think going forward we will see more of the server side desktops.
This allows for cheaper laptops to be issued and still get the job done just as easy.

ym