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ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL
Anvil Storage Utilities (ASU) are the most complete test bed available for the solid state drive today. The benchmark displays test results for, not only throughput but also, IOPS and Disk Access Times. Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and use in our benchmark testing.
Anvil Storage Utilities show much the same as we saw with AS SSD, a very low high sequential write result. WE didn’t post the AS SSD results as we didn’t have the 20 or so minutes it would have taken to complete with the very low 4K write scores. Even with this result, we have seen some very nice numbers with the SPYRUS WorkSpace Plus and, something we need to remember here, security is the name of the game.
FIRST HAND USE
Being new to the SPYRUS WorkSafe Pro 256GB Flash Drive, we would be the first to say that its set up is much more involved than any other drive, this only natural as there are so many options available and most enterprise purchases would rely on the friendly assistance of SPYRUS. For example, when set up and booted, most would be very surprised that there is no access to your PCs hard drive whatsoever. It is completely shut down for the sake of security. Through integration with SPYRUS, we believe this can be changed but this ‘wall’ is very logical as your secure system has an open door with access to untrusted files from the outside system. Start up surprised us and it takes about 30 seconds while it configures the hardware behind the scenes the first time, but after that, this flash drive boots as fast as any SSD contained PC. We also liked the capabilities of the Vault as they allowed us storage when we wanted to use this as straight flash drive storage, rather than a bootable medium.
REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
I have been involved with highly sensitive data for most of my career and can state that encrypted flash drives are an absolute necessity in today’s world. Years ago, I started out with the Ironkey, only to be issued with a McAfee encrypted Flash Drive about a year back. This report on the SPYRUS WorkSafe Pro encrypted flash drive was some time in the making and, in my opinion, a valuable experience.. SPYRUS has cornered the encrypted flash drive segment and established leadership in this industry. As a person who has to insert a smart card into his laptop each and every time it is used, having Rosetta Smart Card capabilities makes things so much easier as that flash drive is the only media by which we can store data.
The benefits and features available to the user with the SPYRUS WorkSpace Pro extend so much further than being able to boot into your own secure Windows 8.1 environment from virtually anywhere, and from either Windows or Mac. Enterprise retains complete control and can even destroy the SPYRUS flash drive, should it get into wrong hands. As well, its ‘Read Only’ feature completely erases all traces of ones activity and downloads when the SPYRUS drive is disconnected, enabling a secure connection from so many places one might never have expected prior to this report.
We also never expected data transfer speeds as high as 271MB/s from a fully encrypted flash drive. We are pretty confident that if you carried this to the next step, with an extra layer of BitLocker protection, speeds would drop just a bit but this performance is unheard of from any encrypted flash drive I have used to date. Our 256GB version will admittedly fetch a niche price tag around $500 putting it somewhere at $2/GB, but one has to ask themselves what their file security is really worth. The SPYRUS WorkSafe Pro 256GB encrypted Flash Drive is definitely deserving of our Editor’s Choice award as there simply isn’t a comparable product available today!
