Review by forum-member wowbagger
Data security has become a very big deal to everyone these days and with the advent of the technological age any way available to implement said security, easily and reliably is more than welcomed. There are many ways of securing your data out there at the moment, software solutions such as Apple’s own “FireVault” not to mention the spattering of external drive solutions containing encryption chips, which alleviate your machine from doing the heavy lifting. Either way be prepared to sacrifice your data read/write speeds because of the processing involved switching the data between it’s encrypted and readable states.
Dutch vendor Freecom is providing a new take on personal data security, giving us a new solution to the problem using RFID equipped access cards. A simple swipe of your access card and the drive becomes readable, another swipe and the drive is locked, unmountable and most importantly unreadable until unlocked again.
I, like many of you have probably not heard of Dutch hardware producers*Freecom before but as it turns out they’re quite the big deal in the world of hard drives. They’ve been around for a fair when it comes to the world of tech and during that time have been at the forefront of storage development, so after doing a bit of research it’s no surprise that these smart little clog wearing peeps have come up with a new way of keeping your data secure.
The Technical Stuff
To the untrained eye the Mobile Drive Secure looks no different to any other portable external drive. There’s a standard USB mini port on the back as well as power jack for those three people out there with underpowered ports and inside there’s a 2.5” drive (320GB/500GB) running at a pretty standard 5400rpm. Nothing fancy there.
Where it gets interesting is the technology behind Freecom’s security of which, their lack of “how” it all works being the front-runner. The packaging and every bit of documentation you touch will tell you the RFID access cards are AES-128 bit encrypted and by swiping them across the drive you “unlock” the device making it readable. The data itself is not encrypted on the drive, thus not affecting read/write speeds but as to what the access cards are unlocking there’s no clear detail.
Some reports point towards the card merely opening the controller to the drive, which means any Joe with half a brain could just rip the shell off the drive and plug it in to another case. Others suggest there’s a hidden partition that once instigated by the access card is decrypted in turn providing access to the data. I couldn’t find said partition using a variety of tools I ran over my review unit so I’m going to assume it’s more likely the first.
To test things out as best I could after pairing the drive with the included cards I reformatted it using Disk Utility, creating only 1 partition on the drive and once erased the drive still locked & unlocked using the cards. This makes me lean towards the drive using the controller locking, not containing a special hidden partition. It was the best test I could do beyond opening the case myself, which I was unfortunately not really allowed to do, and when quizzed Freecom, understandably so, weren’t exactly forth coming with details on the security details. Anyone else care to ellaborate?
Getting it working
Just like most hard drives these days there isn’t exactly a lot to do on this front. If you want to use it without the security feature you just plug it in (A USB mini to USB cable is provided). The drive is pre-formatted as FAT32 so it works on both Mac & Windows platforms straight out of the box but you’ll probably reformat it two minutes later. Before you do though, you’ll find a suite of Freecom’s utilities on the drive, the most important being the Freecom RFID application which you’ll need to use to pair the two included access keys with the drive.
Running the Setup app in the root of the drive simply copies the data off on to your machine so that Freecom RFID and other proprietary applications can be installed at a later date if required.
Pairing the keys with the drive is a two minute process, you’re simply prompted to hold each key over the drive and wait for the appropriate beep before repeating the process. Now with your encoded keys and a wave of the hand your drive will happily beep, it’s light change from green to red and happily disappear from your Finder, albeit with an annoying message saying you didn’t eject the disk properly. Clearly the best rule of practice here to be eject then lock.
The drive remains in whichever state it may be in whilst powered, at any point should it be disconnected from it’s power source it will return to a guarded locked state and require the access card to re-mount it.
The good, the bad & the unknown
In theory it all sounds like a pretty neat way of hiding your pr0n collection from your misses but until someone can clarify exactly how the encryption works I’m a little worried that anyone with a screwdriver and a spare drive case could get in there.
Freecom’s own*PR docs state “The keycard system on the Hard Drive Secure keeps your data completely safe...” and so I hope there is more to it and am happy to be contacted to be informed so.
If you’re looking for a good, portable & more secure option than you currently have then this may be a nice option for you. If you wear a al-foil hat and encrypt your shopping list I think it best you keep on searching.
The*Freecom Mobile Drive Secure is distributed in Australia by*Multimedia Technology Online.
All photos available*here.
Review: Freecom Mobile Drive Secure