Last time I went to Korea to visit our friends at SavitMicro, Jun showed me a mock-up of their new external USB enclosure for 2.5” hard disks, the DataMore V2. A few months later, Jun sends me the final product, already available on the Korean market.
So, what’s so special about this USB 2.0 enclosure? As you can see, it has a fingerprint reader. The goal of the DataMore V2 is to provide you with an unbreakable solution for storing sensitive data on a hard disk. You can have for instance 100GB of totally private disk space.
A bit skeptical at first, I decided yesterday to install the enclosure. Once the hard disk was in place, the first thing a geek would do (you know, a guy that NEVER EVER reads user manuals) is to connect it to a PC. Of course, that DIDN’T work! My PC with XP detects a CD player instead. Not good… After several attempts I finally lost my temper and dug up the manual and installation CD out of the trashcan. Then, I was able to learn that the hard disk had to be formatted with a specific SavitMicro utility before using it.

With very clear and simple step-by-step instructions, the formatting tool asks you if you want to create a single encrypted partition, or a public partition and an encrypted one. Once you choose the amount of MB you want to allocate to each partition, you are invited to scan one of your fingers (or all of them) to be able to access your data.
After these steps were completed, the DataMore V2 no longer showed up as a CD player, but as a hard disk with 2 partitions. Only one of them is accessible once you provide your fingerprint.
What’s interesting is that when you use the enclosure on another PC, you don’t have to install any drivers, everything being directly included in the DataMore V2. Upon connection to another PC, the DataMore V2 only asks you to scan your fingerprint to access your data.

This product is not yet available outside Korea, but you can order it as a special order on GeekStuff4U.com, before it makes it into the catalog!