Who Needs a Biometric External Hard Drive?

We got the wrong hard drive. We should have bought a biometric external hard drive. While we have had no problems with the Seagate 5,000 GB hard drive that we purchased last year, we now have a concern that has nothing to do with the Seagate's performance, reliability or cost. To be honest, we didn't buy a biometric equivalent because we didn't know they existed at the time.

Regular USB 2.0 high performance external hard drives are great value. As advertised, you can backup at the push of a button, schedule to happen automatically and so on. We are now able to recover our systems in the event of crash, theft, loss etc within a few hours of replacing a laptop or disk drive. The downside is that we now have all of our backup data sitting on a desk top in plain view. Yes, we could lock it up in a safe after each backup, but that's not really practical. The most convenient answer is a biometric external hard drive.

There are several well known brands of biometric hard drive available and the cost is not significantly greater than a regular external drive without the security. The option that we will probably settle on is from LaCie:

Biometric devices such as the LaCie 1TB d2 are now common because the cost of the technology has fallen dramatically. It makes sense to give your data backup devices at least as much security as the laptop you carry around with you.

Other manufacturers with products in this space include: Artemis Solutions Group and MXI Security.

If you have a concern about laptop security as well as finding a fast and efficient backup device consider a biometric hard drive.