Disk Encryption Solutions: Review Of PGP And DriveCrypt For Laptops

You may not always be able to protect your laptop from a thief, but you can keep the data it contains safe. Two new products -- PGP Corp.'s PGP Whole Disk Encryption 9.5 and SecurStar GmbH's DriveCrypt Plus Pack 3.5 -- promise to protect your data, so that even if your computer falls into the wrong hands, its contents will remain unreadable. Both applications are easy to use and offer an impressive suite of tools, but most users will appreciate the more practical features and lower price tag of PGP's product. Both PGP and DriveCrypt offer on-the-fly, full-disk encryption, which means that they scramble all the data on your hard drive the moment you save it to disk. Both use the AES-256 algorithm, a fast, well-established and trusted mechanism for encrypting data.

Both protect a computer from the minute it's powered on, and give you a single sign-on so you have to enter your password only once per session, when you boot the PC. The initial setup for both applications -- creating an encryption key and telling the software which partitions you want to protect -- takes just a few minutes. Once that's done, you can open, change, save and close files as you normally would, and the software does all the work. Most important, the programs do their job quietly in the background and have no noticeable impact on day-to-day system performance.

The link for this article located at ComputerWorld is no longer available.