Lenovo Thinkpad Secure Hard Drive 160GB
Christo van Gemert

Numbered protection
Lenovo loves giving its customers ways in which to keep their data out of harm’s way. If it’s not the near-invincible range of Thinkpad laptops, it’s data redundancy in the form of built-in RAID storage.

Now even your external storage can be secured. The Thinkpad Secure Hard Drive encrypts the data using a 128-bit AES key. Decryption is achieved using a pass key that’s entered using the number pad on the front – six digits minimum and up to 16 digits for maximum confusion.

Its rugged design (it’s meant to take a few knocks) counts against it, making the Secure Hard Drive a bit bulkier than its cousins. It’s also a lot pricier per gigabyte than its peers, but that’s the price of having sensitive data under virtual lock and key. Transfers speeds are okay, but not stellar.

There’s no question: if you have sensitive data that needs to be kept from prying eyes, this is the storage/backup solution to have. Security and privacy know no price and for this specialised security solution you will fork out about R2 100. Thankfully, it’s a Lenovo product, so there’s a good track record backing this up.