Three More External USB 3.0 Drives Benchmarked

Features
By Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos
published

Another trio of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 drives landed in our German lab recently. As some of the contenders we've benchmarked underperform compared to our expectations, it’s quite clear that hard drive speed matters again, now that we've moved beyond USB 2.0.

Samsung Software: Auto Backup And SecretZone

Samsung adds two software tools to the Story Station 3.0 drives: Auto Backup and Secret Zone. The first is a simple but efficient backup utility. It comes preset to back up documents, but not multimedia files like photos, videos, or music. Those must be chosen manually. Backups can be password protected, and the utility supports versioning, scheduling, and compression.

The second program is called SecretZone, and it allows the user to create encrypted containers that can be mapped into Windows as individual drives. The tool isn’t as powerful or mature as TrueCrypt, but it’s somewhat easier to handle. It also supports converting container files into executables, which may be decrypted on the fly without the SecretZone utility.

Auto Backup

SecretZone 2.0.110

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos