Read our full Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 review (opens in new tab). It’s expensive by storage standards, but the VP80ES is a solid attempt at providing an easy-to-use, transportable and secure repository. Out of the box, it comes with a soft carry pouch and two cables for USB-A and USB-C connections. The storage component is an SSD, although this drive can only achieve reading and writing of around 250MB/s over a USB 3.2 Gen 1 connection. It’s a robust encryption tool and is compatible with Windows 10. And, the drive will erase the contents if too many passwords are incorrectly entered. To encrypt an external hard drive on Windows 10, we will be using a tool called BitLocker.

Kingston designed it to cope with various potential attacks, including BadUSB and even physical intrusion into the mechanism. Secure encrypted storage devices once required software to be installed to provide a means to input the decryption key, but the Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 circumvents the need for that with an inbuilt touch screen.Īvailable in 480GB, 960GB and 1920GB capacities, the VP80ES, as it's also known, sports FIPS 197 certified security and a Common Criteria EAL5+ certified secure microprocessor.

Encrypting external drive