Computer users have different reasons for wanting to protect the data on their hard drives. The reason can be hiding your ripped music stash from RIAA or protecting confidential information for your business. Whatever the reason, Addonics has a new hard drive enclosure that will do the trick.

The Addonics Diamond Cipher Hard Drive Kit retails for $139 and can protect the data stored on the drive (which isn’t included) with 256-bit AES encryption. AES 256-bit encryption is strong enough for use by the government on Top Secret documents that would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to the country if lost or stolen.

The Addonics kit includes a hard drive enclosure that features both eSATA and USB 2.0 connectivity to a host computer. The enclosure can be used as an external drive or it can be fitted inside a computer as a cartridge drive. The encryption for the data stored using the system requires no passwords.

A pair of USB keys is included and the data on the drive inside the enclosure is only accessible when the USB key is inserted into the host computer. Addonics says that the hardware encryption process causes no noticeable performance degradation on the host computer. The encryption is also OS independent so it will work in any computing environment.

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