Verbatim Small Business Security Pack 16 GB

'The name's Bond ... James Bond ... and this is my trusty USB flash drive'. Security is the name of the game with Verbatim's Secure 'n' Go Small Business Security Pack, so much so that it's almost worthy of a James Bond gadget, designed for keeping top-secret MI5 classified information safe from the likes of Dr No and Auric Goldfinger. So if you're as security conscious as 007, if you often carry around confidential files, or if you want complete control over who can copy files to and from your PC, then this Security Pack is for you.

The 16 GB Small Business Security Pack flash drive is a compact (6.4 x 2.1 x 1.1 cm) and featherweight (12 g) disk with a 256-bit AES data encryption function. That means the drive's contents are automatically encrypted to ensure your files can't be read or copied by anyone who somehow manages to hack their way into the drive. When you first plug the flash drive in, the data protection software launches automatically and asks you to choose a password. Once you've done that, you're free to load the drive with files. These are automatically encrypted as they're copied onto the drive. From then on, each time you plug this flash drive into a computer, the software will ask you to enter the password in order to access the drive and decrypt its contents. Note that you'll have to wait around 10 seconds for the drive to check the password and retrieve your data before you have full access to its contents. Without the password, there's no way to access the files, and the drive's contents will be automatically and permanently deleted after 20 failed attempts at entering the password.

In true James Bond villain style, we decided to enter the wrong password 20 times to find out whether we could still retrieve the deleted files using software we've already used to successfully recover accidentally deleted files. In this case though, the software was unable to retrieve any data at all.

And as if all that isn't enough, Verbatim even supplies Endpoint Protection Basic security software to help restrict access to the files on your PC (see inset).

Finally, we were a bit disappointed to see a removable USB connector cover, as this will inevitably end up getting lost.

James Bond may well need a super-safe flash drive, but he'll also need to transfer files as quickly as possible, leaving him time to jump into his Aston Martin and make an escape.

Here are the results the Verbatim Small Business Security Pack flash drive got on in our CrystalDiskMark test:
 

These results are mostly confirmed by our purely practical tests:
 

Data read performances are quite simply excellent. In fact, these are the best performance we've seen to date from a USB 2.0 flash drive, and they're not far off the maximum possible performances for a USB 2.0 to PC connection. Write speeds are a bit more of a mixed bag, however. Although we've seen better, they're still at the upper end of average compared with all the USB flash drives we've tested to date. The instant data encryption function almost certainly has something to do with slowing things down, but we guess that's the (small) price you pay for high -security storage. So although the write speeds aren't quite as fast as we'd like, they're still pretty good.

All in all, the Secure 'n' Go Small Business Security Pack flash drive is almost faultless. You'd have to look to USB 3.0 flash drives to find any significant increase in performance.