Of all the portable storage devices I have reviewed during 2015 this is by far the most secure, to the point that this is what I now use to back up my own business data.  At the last company I worked for there were two instances where data was stolen by an ex-employee which led to the business losing thousands of pounds and creating hours of headaches so having a device that backs up all critical data with passwords and only known by the few who need to know is so important.

The iStorage diskAshur Pro comes with a built in keypad on the front which you can set to have a pin code of between 7 and 16 numbers, when setting up the pin it has the same inbuilt combination checking as when you set up any passwords online to stop obvious 1111111’s and 123456789’s etc.  If your device has fallen into the wrong hands they have ten attempts to crack the pin, upon failure of this an option is given to reset the device by using a complicated code, after this if there is another ten failed attempts the hard drive will need reformatting.  (so make sure you don’t forget the pin!!)

The iStorage diskAshur Pro is made from black plastic with a matt rubbery finish, on the front is the keypad and on the right side is a USB cable which is around 11cm in length – if this length is too short the device does come with an extension cable.  Inside this casing is a 2.5 inch SATA disk and you can choose between four sizes 500GB, 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB; you could also opt for an SSD of 128GB or 512GB.

It worked just as well as the unencrypted portable hard drives we reviewed this month, with speeds of around 110MB/S on Windows and 100 MB/S on OS X.  This is our pick of the month. RRP £199.99

5 Out of 5

Buy now

Pros

Quick Read/Write times

Nice Design

Easy to use