iStorage datAshur PRO 8GB Secure Flash Drive Review

You may have never heard of the company, but iStorage are the trusted global leaders in PIN-authenticated data storage devices using military-level hardware encryption. The datAshur PRO Flash Drive is one of a number of USB drives of differing formats and capacities that iStorage offers. Formed in 2009, the company offers a wide range of PIN encryption devices in a number of formats; USB 2.0 & 3.0 Flash Drives, SSD Flash Drives, portable HDDs & SSDs, and a desktop hard drive. Capacities range from 4GB up to 8TB. The range of products have a pretty impressive list of accreditations; FIPS 197 (Advanced Encryption Standard, Computer Security Standard, Cryptography), FIPS 140-2 Level 2 (Tamper Evident, and seals), FIPS 140-2 Level 3 (Responding to attempts of a Physical attack), IP57 (Protected from limited dust ingress and water immersion up to 1M), CESG (National Technical Authority for Information Assurance) and CCTM (Claims Tested Mark). The dataAshur PRO 8GB Flash Drive is the entry level model in a four-capacity product line - the others being 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. iStorage claim it to be the world's most secure USB 3.0 flash drive and also quote performance at up to 116MB/s for reads and up to 43MB/s for writes. Features: USB 3.0 Flash Drive Capacities up to 64GB FIPS 140-2 Level3 validated – Cert. No. 2688 CESG CPA / NLNCSA – certifications pending FIPS PUB 197 certified IP57 certified – water/dust resistant Bootable drive AES 256- bit hardware encryption – no software required OS & Platform independent The datAshur PRO comes in a blister pack, with a list of some of its features on the front, in addition to a more detailed description of what the drive is, how it works and further features. Apart from the drive and its protective sleeve, the only other thing that you get is a very useful quick start guide. The guide shows you how to get started with the drive and how to change from the default security PIN number to one of your own (must be from 7-15 digits). You may find that you need to charge the datAshur before use - just stick it in powered USB port for anything from 30 minutes to an hour and it should be ready to go. One side of the drive holds the 10-key keypad, a key button and three LEDs. The LED under the key button at one end of the drive glows blue when the drive is connected to a USB port. The two other LEDs are at the other end of the drive and indicate the state of the drive - red for locked and green for unlocked. To use the drive, you press the key button then type in your PIN code (you have around 10 secs to do this), then press the key button again and within 30 seconds insert the drive into a USB slot to use it. Once finished with the drive, save the data on the drive and unplug it; the act of unplugging the flash drive locks it. Specifications Capacities: 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB Interface: USB 3.0 Drive dimensions (with sleeve): 80 x 20 x 10.5mm Drive dimensions (without sleeve): 78 x 18 x 8mm Weight: 25g Waterproof: MIL-STD-810F | IP57 Certified Hardware encryption: XTS-AES 256-bit Warranty: 3 years Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. iStorage quote performance figures for the datAshur PRO as up 116MB/s for reads and up to 43MB/s for writes. Under test conditions, the drive surpassed the official read figure easily but on the other hand the writes were down on the official figure. The darAshur PRO is very consistent when it comes to writes across all types of file transfers. When it comes to dealing with the contents of the Steam, Audio and Movie folders the read performance is very good. The reads tail off when dealing with the small bity files of the File folder and fall off a cliff when dealing with the contents of the Photo folder. The iStorage datAshur PRO supports Read-Only (Write Protect), Read/Write and is immune to BadUSB. This last one is very handy as BadUSB overwrites the firmware on a USB device with a malicious code that once inserted into another device can plant malware or steal information, and do it while avoiding any anti-virus software. A neat piece of design is that the drive can be protected by a Timeout Lock. If the drive is attached to a device and left unattended, the timeout lock will automatically lock the drive after a period of between 1 and 99 minutes. The drive is protected against brute force hacking for both admin and user PINs. If a user enters an incorrect PIN number ten consecutive times, the user PIN will be deleted, but the data will remain on the drive and is only accessible by the correct admin PIN. However, if the admin then enters a wrong PIN number ten consecutive times then it's game over as the both PINs, the encryption key AND all the data will be permanently deleted. The drive will then default back to factory settings and will have to be formatted before it can be used again. The iStorage datAshur 8GB USB Flash Drive is available for just under £70 from Amazon. Discuss on our Facebook page HERE. Pros Bullet-proof data protection. Military-level encryption. Good read speeds. Cons Pricey Kitguru says: If you need to physically shift sensitive data around, there's not much on the market that can do the job with anything like the protection afforded by iStorage's datAshur PRO.

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iStorage datAshur PRO 8GB Secure Flash Drive Review

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