Review: IRONKEY S200

[Drum Thumper]

A new story entry has been added:

[drupal=472]Review: IRONKEY S200 [/drupal]

By Joe O'Meara

Today, we are going to talk about something very important: security. Now, I'm not going to go completely left field and talk about the importance of hardening systems and the like; quite the contrary, we're spending today talking about portable security. Advances have been made in the realm of portable security; today we will be reviewing the IronKey S200 1 gigabyte flash drive. The good folks at IronKey were kind enough to send us a drive for torture testing

[x88x]

A few other points on the Ironkey:

If you enter the wrong password 10 times in a row, the drive fries the crypto chip, making the data completely unreadable (since the crypto chip contains a unique key).

Physically, the drive is built such that if you attempt to disassemble it, the crypto chip will be destroyed.

IIRC, the enterprise drives (the most expensive tier of the S200) allow for a tiered authentication system, so that an administrator account can be set up to unlock multiple drives.

One of the reasons for the Ironkey's high performance (and high price) is that the S200 uses SLC memory chips instead of the MLC chips normally used in flash drives. Recently, Ironkey also launched the D200 line, which is identical to the S200 except that it uses MLC memory chips. As a result, the D200 drives are cheaper, but not quite as high performing. The low capacity drives have a relatively small price difference, but once you get up to 4GB+, it becomes significant (ex, 16GB S200: $285 vs 16GB D200: $187). Also, the D200 is available in capacities up to 32GB.

[BuzzKillington]

Extremely quiet & lightweight. I have had several drives over the years.

Quiet? lol.

[Drum Thumper]

Quiet? lol.

it's as quiet as a church mouse on Sunday. I guess I should have mentioned that in the review lol.

[diluzio91]

it's as quiet as a church mouse on Sunday. I guess I should have mentioned that in the review lol.

are church mice less noisy on sundays.... do they check their iphones for the date?

[x88x]

are church mice less noisy on sundays.... do they check their iphones for the date?

Pfft! No! Now you you're just being ridiculous. Mice don't have iPhones, everybody knows that.

Obviously they have Nexus One's.

[diluzio91]

lol.... potential mouse phones found here
http://blogote.com/2009/featured-art...ll-phones.html

[x88x]

Spot the fake!

[mark22]

lol....(colocation) potential mouse phones found here
http://blogote.com/2009/featured-art...ll-phones.html

lol...i also found it here...as you mentioned in your post.

[SXRguyinMA]

ya I'm sure you did