Maxtor BlackArmor SentrySafe Fire-Safe

Maxtor showed off their BlackArmor hardware encryption portable drive over at the Seagate booth. This drive sports government-grade AES encryption certified by the NIST. The BlackArmor is essentially a portable consumer version of the FED option you can get from Dell in their laptops (Momentus 5400 FDE.2). According to Maxtor, there are no backdoors to this drive. Without the password the drive is completely useless. The drive also doesn't require any software to be installed on the host machine. There is a small, unencrypted partition on the drive that stores the utilities to decrypt the data. Check out the gallery to see it in action.

 

SentrySafe was also at the Seagate booth with their recently announced Fire-Safe fire and water resistant USB 2.0 external hard drive. An 80GB or 160GB Maxtor 2.5" drive is sealed inside the enclosure which can resist half an hour of fire protection up to 1550F or be completely submerged in water. Although pricey, at $259.99 for 80GB and $339.99 for 160GB, SentrySafe will provide data recovery free of charge if your drive is damaged by fire or water. Not bad considering professional data recover can easily cost several hundred to several thousand dollars depending on the extent of the damage.