For the longest time, portable flash drives have been tied to the USB interface, despite faster interfaces for external devices being available. Perhaps this is because of the popularity and proven history of the USB interface. However, a small and rather unknown company by the name of Kanguru set out to change things up and introduced the eFlash, a flash drive which can be used with either USB or eSATA interfaces . Kanguru claims the drive is over twice as fast when using eSATA instead of USB 2.0 Continue reading

The ATP Earth Drive is a “green” option in the realm of previously environmentally harmful computer accessories. It wasn’t too long ago that nearly every component of computers was fulled with toxins that could potentially hurt the planet if not disposed of properly. This USB flash drive compensates for these with a biodegradable PLA (a kind of plastic that can be made from corn) plastic casing, and a very small form factor. The components of the flash media are completely encapsulated, like one of the coin-sized flash drives or a micro SD card, so the flash drive is water and dust-proof, and it is resistant to some physical trauma. ATP also donates a portion of all EarthDrive sales to American Forests, which plants trees. Continue reading

USB flash drives have become amazingly cheap these days – much like the floppy disk of old (anyone remember those?), it’s become the default method for transferring data between computers. However, because of their small size and their prevalence, they are very often lost, stolen, or broken. Despite this, most people don’t give any thought to securing the data they store on them – we either assume we’ll always have them on our person or in our control. Even if we use disk encryption (such as PGP or TrueCrypt), that is much better suited for use on a single dedicated system as opposed to something you can use easily on multiple machines.

Enter the IronKey. While most USB drives do allow for, and work well with disk encryption, the IronKey is intended to be an answer to many portable security issues users might have. The IronKey protects against hostile networks, and includes utilities for storing passwords, and clean browsing software. In effect, the IronKey is your very own bastion of portable security, meant to survive whatever you throw at it and keep your data out of prying hands without too much interference.

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