Use

The two RFID tags are already "married" to the encrypted hard drive. This means that no other key will not work on this drive. Even Silverstone will not be able to provide you with further tags, if you were to lose them both. Once they are gone, your data is locked and inaccessible.

A clean and completely unallocated hard drive is needed to enable encryption. Upon first turning on the Treasure TS01, you are required to pair both tags with the enclosure. Once this is done, the unit can be accessed and the hard drive formatted. After completing these steps, the hard drive can only be encrypted/decrypted with the correct RFID tags in a TS01. Even if your unit ceases to function, you can insert the hard drive into a brand new Treasure enclosure and use the original keys to gain access to the drive.

You may, of course use the TS01B as a normal enclosure without the use of encryption if you wish. You either insert a drive which already has data on it, in which case it cannot be encrypted and does not require the RFID tags or you format the new drive without pairing the two tags.

Performance

There does not seem to be any performance difference between a plainly visible drive or one which is encrypted. It seems like the protection is volume based (also called VBE) instead of file based (FBE). VBE means that the volume is encrypted regardless of what data is on it. This leads to an inability for normal windows to even recognize the file format and its contents. File based leaves the formatting intact and merely encrypts each file seperately. In such a case, the general contents of the hard drive can be viewed, even without the keys, but none of the files can be decrypted. In such a case a normal looking text file will turn out to be "gibberish" once opened.


The Silverstone Treasure TS01B manages a very impressive 33.3 MB/s with HD Tach and an equally good 2% CPU utilization. These are excellent results, ranking it among the best enclosures of the bunch. Most of the enclosures in our graphs are for 3.5" drives and the TS01B can hold its own and even beat most of them.




ATTO returns the same read speed and also shows that the Treasure TS01B is almost as fast when writing data to the disk. Remember all these values are with the encryption turned on. The enclosure handles all the tasks of encryption so it is completely independent of the type of system you have.