Final thoughts

The massive proliferation of USB drives and increasing capacities have brought real security concerns to the fore. The ease of use has enabled users to dump data, often sensitive, on to drives with no inherent security features.

A-DATA Technology is targetting the niche market that requires hardware-level security from this most common removable storage device. The "my Flash" fingerprint disk adds a capacitance-based fingerprint scanner to a regular USB drive, and clever software makes installation and usage a cinch.

Once setup, which takes around 5 minutes, the drive's secure contents can only be accessed via a verified fingerprint or password. A little practice and you should be able to verify a chosen fingerprint without tripping the drive's safety (password authentication) feature. A-DATA also bundles in a bunch of useful embedded software, including folder encryption, drive-based email, and automated form-filling.

We like the concept and like A-DATA's drive. It looks great and works just as advertised. However, we'd like to see the drive initialise much faster than the 12 seconds it takes, once it's plugged in, to throw up the verification screen up. We'd also like to see the price drop a touch. We fully appreciate that it features some cool technology but £30 is a little too steep for a 512MB drive. We temper this statement by fully expecting the price to fall as uptake increases. Non-Windows compatibility would be useful, as well.

In summary, a cool piece of hardware with some truly practical benefits. We've seen integrated fingerprint readers in high-end laptops for a while now, and it was only a matter of time until the same technology was transferred to removable storage. Kudos to A-DATA for being one of the first to market. Recommended if you need hardware-level security on a USB stick.