They are interesting. But they are a huge red flag and scream examine me if it's in your luggage and your crossing a boarder.

I'm somewhat dubious about a hardware system not having long term undiscovered flaws. Be sure to use software based data protection on top of the hardware solution.

Overkill and overpriced. If you're on Windows, bitlocker is enough. If you're on Linux, LUKS is enough.

I've used Apricorn drives at previous jobs. They're cool and very much fit for purpose, but I'd have a hard time justifying the significant price premium when software is nearly as good, free, and works with any drive.

What is your use case for this?

• Confidential files in a public setting? Don't fucking bring confidential files to a public setting. But if you must, a big bulky laptop with (good) FDE is a lot more sequre than a flash drive someone can pickpocket.
• Border crossing? Guess what? You paint a MASSIVE red flag on your back and get to learn that you don't actually have all that many rights in the time between stepping on foreign soil and being admitted by customs. Congrats, you gave them the wrong code three times and it got wiped. They are going to break your face and put you in a black site.
• Hiding sensitive/highly illegal content in the event of a police investigation: Yeah... if you are at the point where there is a warrant (or black van) out for your arrest than it really doesn't matter if they can see whatever you were looking at last night.

At my old job we required these for "thumb drives" and all they ever did was make reformatting machines pure hell.

I have one as a 'last resort' option. It's got backups of BitWarden, Aegis and Standard Notes and is only connected to my machine during backups.

Seems like it's a good starting point.

I wonder if you can encrypt the files prior to storing them on the key, which would then encrypt them a second time with a different method. Would the compromise the data in any meaningful way? Or would it mean that you had to decrypt the key and then decrypt the data a second time?

Couldn't the data be cloned and cracked off device without having to worry about the pin code?

I have this device and use it to store my keepassxc and onlykey backups, and it's useful to me because I've stopped using passwords (I only need to remember the pins for these devices which can unlock my keepass dbs that have everything else).

It seems secure enough for my use case, especially since the files I store in it are themselves encrypted (the onlykey backup still requires a pin), but I still want them to be difficult to access.

I've had to rely on it before but only because I didn't prepare a backup onlykey ahead of time- ideally it should be one of many recovery methods. But so far it's worked great for me.

I have a USB drive with a keypad on it, it stores my FIPS Compliant SSH-key for IL-5 government systems. I unlock it to add my key into my ssh-agent, and don't use it for anything else. Though it is an 8gig USB stick, so I could in theory run some kind of security/pen testing flavor of linux plus a VPN Client to connect to said systems.

I'll store my weird shit on an unsecured hard drive stashed in the woods. Like those that came before me, and those before me.

I see one use-case, If you're going w/ sth illegal as hell to a place where you might get arrested and searched for just being there i.e a protest, nuking your (illegal) data might save your ass.

I use them in my job and I find them better than the software only solution and I like them when I have to use them for sensitive file transfers.