Introduction

We had our first taste of Super Talent's SuperCrypt USB 3.0 thumb drive at Computex back in June. Super Talent was set up in the Taipei 101 at the Gigabyte USB 3.0 Showcase that displayed several new USB 3.0 products from several manufacturers. Gigabyte put Super Talent at the head of the tables and after seeing the SuperCrypt and RAIDDrive, Super Talent's high performance USB 3.0 thumb drives, it was easy to see why Gigabyte wanted to showcase these creations.

Today we are looking at the Super Talent SuperCrypt 32GB USB 3.0 thumb drive that features high transfer speeds and enterprise level hardware security. The SuperCrypt is much faster than a standard thumb drive; up to 240MB/s since it is a marriage of solid state and USB 3.0 technology.

As you can imagine, high performance also comes at a high cost. This is one of the areas that to this point has held back high speed USB 3.0 devices. Today we will break down the Super Talent SuperCrypt pricing structure and see how the drive performs.

Specifications, Pricing and Availability

The SuperCrypt works in both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports so you will be able to use the drive in just about any computer on the planet. Just don't expect speeds over 30 to 35MB/s when using the drive in USB 2.0 ports. The 64MB cache buffer eliminates any caching issue that would slow the drive while reading and writing. The real speed of the SuperCrypt comes into play once you start using USB 3.0 ports and Super Talent's modified USB 3.0 driver (found on the Super Talent website). At that point, you can expect read performance to go up to around 240MB/s and write speeds up to 184MB/s.

Speed might be the biggest advantage of the SuperCrypt but it is only half of the story. Our sample drive uses a 128bit encryption in ECB mode. Super Talent also offers a SuperCrypt PRO model that moves this up to 256bit AES in XTS mode. From the factory, the drive is divided into two separate partitions: one public and one private. A small software application is kept on the read only public portion of the drive and will allow you to unlock the hidden area as long as you have the password.

Here we see the log in screen that allows us to unlock the drive. No information is stored on the host PC and everything is handled in the SuperCrypt.

We were not able to find the SuperCrypt at Newegg, but did find the entire line up at Amazon. At the time of writing, the 16GB is available for 119.84, 32GB for 170.24, 64GB for 260.96, 128 for 487.20 and the massive 256GB for 778.40 USD. As always, high-end technology comes at a high cost.