KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
One of the latest additions to Kingston's range of encrypted devices is the Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80ES, Kingston’s first OS-independent hardware-encrypted external SSD with a touch-screen. It's quite a unique product, but is it worth the £290 asking price? We find out today.
Aimed at small to medium business users and content creators, the Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80ES has FIPS 197 certified XTS-AES 256-bit encryption, is TAA compliant and uses a Common Criteria EAL5+ (CC EAL5+) certified secure microprocessor.
The Vault Privacy 80ES range comprises just three capacities (at the time of writing), the entry-level 480GB drive (the one we are reviewing here), 960GB and a flagship 1.92TB model.
Using a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C interface, Kingston rate the drive as up to 250MB/s for both reads and writes.
Kingston backs the drive with a 3-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 480GB.
- Interface: USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C.
- Form Factor: External.
- Dimensions: 122.5 x 84.2 x 18.5mm
- Drive Weight: 468g.
The IronKey Vault Privacy 80 ES comes in a largish box with a good clear image of the drive on the front. The background of the front of the box is covered in binary code with the IronKey logo picked out in a lighter colour. Right at the top of the box is a label showing the capacity of the drive while. under the drive. are displayed three of the drives features; Multi-Password, 256-bit AES-KTS encryption and OS independent.
The rear of the box has another image of the drive, under which sit some multi-lingual marketing text.
The blue finished drive enclosure is constructed from a mix of plastic and zinc. The inclusion of zinc is handy as it helps dissipate any heat generated by the drive. The front of the drive is dominated by the coloured touchscreen which measures 58 x 44mm. The screen isn't flush mounted but sits in a recess. If you have large fingers then using the screen is a little awkward, to say the least. It's much easier to use a stylus but for some reason, Kingston didn't think to bundle one with the drive which is a bit frustrating.
The drive uses a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C interface.
Bundled with the drive is a good quality zipped Neoprene travel case, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C to Type-C and USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C to Type-A cables and a Quick Start Guide.
When you plug the drive into the system it performs a self-test. Once the self-test is complete the software asks you to tap a target on the screen for accuracy. The irony is that the message under the target says to use a stylus for best results but it seems Kingston didn't think about bundling one with the drive.
After a welcome and a choose language page, you are directed to the create a password page.
At the top right of the password creation page(s) are two small icons. The top ‘eye' one displays or hides the password characters while the other one is a backspace key. Pressing the numbers on the A-Z page opens the number page and vice versa. Once you have entered and confirmed the password, the Connect page appears.
There are four options; Connect, which connects the drive to the system, Read-only connects the drive in read-only mode (a defence against malware if the drive is plugged into an unknown system). Pressing the Globe icon takes you to the language section (four languages are supported English, French, German and Spanish) and finally, the gear icon takes you to the Admin page.
The Admin section contains three pages and offers a pretty comprehensive list of options.
The first menu page concerns passwords. Here the current Admin password can be changed and any User passwords set up. Read-Only Mode is for setting up global read-only modes. You can also set up password rules; enable numeric or alphabet options and set the minimum password length (The default is 6, the maximum allowed is 64).
Menu two has the password counter, where you can set the maximum number of password retries (the default is 15, the maximum 30). For improved security, you can mix up the number and alphabet keyboard rows. In this menu, you can also set the time length before the drive locks. In the third menu, there is Secure Erase, Touch calibration and touch sound options.
Once a User has been set up there is a much cut-down menu available to them.
We tested the drive as it comes out of the box, factory formatted as exFAT. To test the drive we reformatted it to NTFS.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using V8.
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 manufacturer's 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.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
The IronKey Vault Privacy 80 ES is rated at up to 250MB/s for both reads and writes. We managed to squeeze a tiny bit more out of it when testing it. The best read performance figure we saw was 274MB/s (CrystalDiskMark 8 – default, compressed data tests, Peak Performance profile default and compressed data tests) while the best write performance came from the CrystalDiskMark 8 default profile (using compressed data) at 262MB/s. In the 4K tests, the drive averaged 27.73MB/s (QD1 T1) & 28.17MB/s (QD32 T1) for reads and 59.52MB/s (QD1 T1) & 62.54MB/s (QD32 1T) for writes.
IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on the hard drive and solid-state drive technology.
We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB file.
The IronKey Vault Privacy 80ES displayed decent enough performance in our backup/restore tests. The backup test produced a figure of 267MB/s with 248MB/s as the result of the restore test run.
In the read throughput test the drive peaked at the 8MB block mark with a figure of 260.46MB/s before dropping back very slightly to finish the test run at 259.72MB/s. Writes peaked at the end of the test run with a figure of 246.88MB/s. Both these peak figures confirm Kingston's official 250MB/s for reads and writes.
The PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark has been designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices.
The Data Drive Benchmark uses 3 traces, running 3 passes with each trace:
Trace 1. Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, in to the target drive (write test).
Trace 2. Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
Trace 3. Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test)
Here we show the total bandwidth performance for each of the individual traces.
The Vault Privacy 80ES handled the rigours of PCMark 10's pretty well. The best performance came from the cps 2 (read-write test) trace at 103MB/s.
To test the real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
We use the following folder/file types:
- 100GB data file.
- 60GB iso image.
- 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
- 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
- 12GB Movie folder – (15 files – 8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
- 10GB Photo folder – (304 files – 171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
- 10GB Audio folder – (1,483 files – 1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
- 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
- BluRay Movie – 42GB.
- 21GB 8K Movie demos – (11 demos)
- 16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips – (9 MP4V files).
- 4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
- 1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
When to our real-life file transfer tests, the drive showed excellent consistency in the read performance when dealing with the large file transfers. Write performance wasn't quite as consistent.
Kingston's IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD is a hardware-encrypted external SSD with the interesting addition of a coloured touch screen. The drive is FIPS 197 certified with XTS-AES 256-bit encryption using a Common Criteria EAL5+ (CC EAL5+) certified secure microprocessor. It is also TAA compliant.
There are just three capacities in the range (at the time of writing this review) 480GB (the drive being looked at here), 960GB and 1.92TB. All the drives get a performance rating of up to 250MB/s for read and writes via a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C interface, so it's no speed demon.
The drive has Brute Force and BadUSB attack protection. BadUSB is malware which has been written to attack a drive's firmware, not the data that's stored on the drive. Kingston protects against this threat by using digital signatures and hardware-based security keys to protect the drives controller firmware.
The touchscreen is a little tricky to use if you are blessed with sausage fingers, why Kingston didn't go the extra mile and bundle a stylus in with the drive is a bit of a mystery, especially as it's a joy to use with one. The drive is straightforward to set up and in Admin mode there is a host of adjustable settings such as password length and a number of failed logins.
Being able to set the number of failed logins is a useful tool to have. The default is 15 but it can be set to a maximum of 30 failed attempts. But, and this is very important to keep in mind, the number of re-tries is shared between Admin and User. Once the maximum is reached the drive is securely erased and all data lost.
Dual Read-Only (write protect) mode is supported which gives the drive protection from possible malware attacks when it is connected to an unknown system.
When we tested the drive we could confirm the official read/write figures of 250MB/s. The fastest read speed we saw was 274MB/s while 262MB/s was the fastest write performance we recorded.
We found the 480GB Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 on from Insight for £291.59 (inc VAT) HERE.
Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.
Pros
- Coloured touch screen.
- High level of data security.
- Easy to use once connected.
Cons
- Not the fastest SSD we've ever seen.
- Touch screen can be a bit tricky to use with just fingers.
- Lack of a bundled stylus.
- Not cheap.
KitGuru says: It's not the fastest external SSD we've seen by a long way but it is probably one of the most secure. If you don't like the idea of having large amounts of your most sensitive data floating around in the ether then Kingston's IronKey Vault Privacy 80 External SSD is worth a look. But don't forget those passwords.
