Encryption and Thumb Drives

Recently my wife ran into a situation where she had misplaced her new thumb drive (thankfully, she found it), but it got me to thinking about securing mine. These flash drives are a great way to carry around information, but they are also quite small and obviously, easy to lose.

A quick search led me to the TrueCrypt encryption app. Their site says that they are currently on version 5.0a and I am looking forward to working with it. If all goes well for my flash drive, I am going to have to seriously consider doing this with my laptop as well.

Feel like I am about five years behind the curve on this, but better to admit that than to have the problem just go unchecked.

Choosing a New Hard Drive

I went to the local Office Depot to pick up a new hard drive for a PC that I am rebuilding. As I have not really needed a drive recently, the specs that I had in my mind were: IDE interface , 7200 rpm, and a capacity of about 80 Gigabytes (GB).

I was correct on the first two options, but definitely off on the drive capacity.

I initially chose a Maxtor 160 GB model that was priced $72.99. Then I realized that they had a Maxtor 300 GB with a 16MB cache for only $84.99. As a bonus, the 300 GB drive had a sticker on the box that said the drive inside was actually a 320 GB.

Doubling the drive capacity for $12 seemed like a good idea, so I bought it. Now I have no idea what I actually need a 320 GB drive for, but I do know that it will get filled up. They always do.

I am quite sure that a couple of years from now I will be out at store looking at multi-terabyte (TB) drives trying to figure out how I survived so long without one. I definitely remember this being the case when the hard drives grew from megabytes into gigabytes.