Abit Secure IDE review

If you have sensitive data on your hard disk, you'll know the nagging fear that some snooping busybody or light-fingered type will make off with your secrets.

Abit's Secure IDE is a small circuit board that sits between your hard disk and the cable that connects the hard disk to the rest of your PC. As information is saved to the disk, the Secure IDE encodes it using an onboard encryption chip.

Installing the device is a simple matter of slotting a hard disk on to the circuit board, and the circuit board into a spare IDE cable and a couple of internal power connectors (provided). Along with the card, you also get two keys. These are shaped like FireWire connectors but they won't work in a normal FireWire port.

The keys slot into a reader that screws into your PC's backplate and is wired up to the card of the Secure IDE. Each time you boot up your PC, you stick one of the keys into this reader. (The other key is a spare - keep it somewhere very safe.) To save you the effort of reaching around to the back of the PC all the time, the Secure IDE's key reader comes with a handy extension lead. Unfortunately, though, the reader does not work as a conventional FireWire port.

If no key is inserted, your PC won't be able to see the drive that's being protected by the Secure IDE card. If the Secure IDE is attached to your main hard disk, this means your computer just won't boot. If it's attached to a secondary drive, that drive won't show up in 'My Computer' or anywhere else. Either way, a casual thief would not be able to get to your data. A more determined thief might actually steal your hard disk, if he knew it was there - but it would do him no good. Without one of your keys, Secure IDE won't work and the encoded data on the drive will just be gobbledegook.

Because the encryption and decryption is done using a chip, rather than software installed on the PC, you can use Secure IDE with any operating system you like - Windows and Linux PCs will both see the secured drive as a normal disk. Our tests proved that Secure IDE did not slow down the disk at all, whereas disk encryption software always does.

The bad news is, that the 40-bit encryption this used by this card is breakable, but only by an expert and with a fair amount of effort. If you simply want to deter casual snoopers or make sure that, should you happen to be burgled, the miscreants won't be able to read your sensitive letters, then the Secure IDE is just what you need.

Author: Simon Edwards