When you’re toting around files that cannot fall into enemy hands—be it top-secret aerial photographs or the entire Girls Gone Wild collection ripped to Divx—your portable storage must be secure in the event it’s lost or stolen.

Most portable drives rely on software encryption to protect the drive’s contents from ne’er-do-wells, but if you lose the password or lose the drive, your data could be compromised. LaCie’s Safe drive is accessed via a fingerprint scan, so you’d have to lose both of your hands—it lets you scan a finger from each—to render the drive inoperable.

Setting up accounts and accessing the drive are ridiculously simple. The authentication and new account wizard run directly from the drive (both Windows and OS X versions are available; but no Linux support), so there’s no software to install, although a configuration utility that lets the administrator change accounts and assign read/write ability to users does require installation. Only the person designated as the “administrator” of the drive is allowed to add new accounts, and it’s a process that takes about 30 seconds and involves selecting two different fingers and scanning them several times.

Once your prints are in the database, you plug the Safe drive into a USB port (it’s bus-powered, which is good), and then access the authentication utility which resides on the drive. The utility asks you to scan a finger (either of the two you have scanned) and the drive unlocks in several seconds. It’s a splendidly simple process.
The hard drive inside the elegant outer shell is an 80GB jobbie with an 8MB buffer; it spins at 5,400rpm.

Granted, the specs aren’t top-shelf, but typically the USB bus limits these drives’ performance more than their internal attributes, so a middling rotational speed doesn’t bother us much given the drive’s huge capacity.

The only problem—and it’s a big one—is the data on the drive isn’t protected by encryption. If someone were to remove the drive from its case and know a thing or two about hardware hacking, they could possibly snag the data with a modicum of effort. As a “safe” drive, this is just unacceptable.
—Josh Norem

Month Reviewed: November 2005
Verdict: 6
URL: www.lacie.com

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