Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80ES 480GB External SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD 480GB3. Touch Screen Usability4. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD5. Backup / Restore6. Throughput7. PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark8. Real Life File Transfers9. Closing Thoughts10. View All Pages

Kingston's IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD is a hardware-encrypted external SSD with the interesting addition of a coloured touch screen. The drive is FIPS 197 certified with XTS-AES 256-bit encryption using a Common Criteria EAL5+ (CC EAL5+) certified secure microprocessor. It is also TAA compliant.

There are just three capacities in the range (at the time of writing this review) 480GB (the drive being looked at here), 960GB and 1.92TB. All the drives get a performance rating of up to 250MB/s for read and writes via a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C interface, so it's no speed demon.

The drive has Brute Force and BadUSB attack protection. BadUSB is malware which has been written to attack a drive's firmware, not the data that's stored on the drive. Kingston protects against this threat by using digital signatures and hardware-based security keys to protect the drives controller firmware.

The touchscreen is a little tricky to use if you are blessed with sausage fingers, why Kingston didn't go the extra mile and bundle a stylus in with the drive is a bit of a mystery, especially as it's a joy to use with one. The drive is straightforward to set up and in Admin mode there is a host of adjustable settings such as password length and a number of failed logins.

Being able to set the number of failed logins is a useful tool to have. The default is 15 but it can be set to a maximum of 30 failed attempts. But, and this is very important to keep in mind, the number of re-tries is shared between Admin and User. Once the maximum is reached the drive is securely erased and all data lost.

Dual Read-Only (write protect) mode is supported which gives the drive protection from possible malware attacks when it is connected to an unknown system.

When we tested the drive we could confirm the official read/write figures of 250MB/s. The fastest read speed we saw was 274MB/s while 262MB/s was the fastest write performance we recorded.

We found the 480GB Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 on from Insight for £291.59 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Coloured touch screen.
• High level of data security.
• Easy to use once connected.

Cons

• Not the fastest SSD we've ever seen.
• Touch screen can be a bit tricky to use with just fingers.
• Lack of a bundled stylus.
• Not cheap.

KitGuru says: It's not the fastest external SSD we've seen by a long way but it is probably one of the most secure. If you don't like the idea of having large amounts of your most sensitive data floating around in the ether then Kingston's IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD is worth a look. But don't forget those passwords.

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