Lexar JumpDrive Secure II USB Flash Drive - Mac & PC Support

Using Encrypted Vaults

We created an encrypted vault using Lexar's new software. The process was quite simple: 

Creating an Encrypted Vault under Windows XP

First, we chose the vault size, using a slider ranging between 32MB and the maximum size of the drive.  Note that you can create a vault on either the Lexar drive or on your system's hard drive.  In the event that you create an encrypted vault on your hard drive, the maximum size of the vault is 2GB. 

Creating an Encrypted Vault under OS X

The same dialog box under Windows

After selecting the size of the vault, you are then asked to provide a password to access the vault.  Lexar's setup utility provides you with a meter that tells you the strength of a password that you've just created based on its length. 

Once you've provided a password for the vault, the utility will begin the creation of the vault.  This process does take a little while, but no more than a matter of a couple of minutes on our test machines. 

With the vault created and mounted, it was ready to use.

Once created, you can use Lexar's Dashboard to mount and unmount an encrypted vault, but you cannot delete it using the utility.  Instead, to delete it, you have to find the actual volume file (a .lxv file) and delete that manually.

We found and deleted the AnandTech.lxv file, but had mixed results under Windows and OS X. 

The vault that we just created

Under Windows, Lexar's Dashboard detected that we had deleted the lxv file and removed itself from the list of encrypted vaults, but under OS X, it didn't.  So although the vault was physically deleted, it still appeared in the list of mountable vaults in OS X.  Trying to mount the vault just resulted in an error and asking us to search manually for the vault file.  Other than that issue, the creation, mounting and unmounting worked flawlessly on both Windows XP and OS X. 

Deleting a vault results in this message being displayed under Windows XP.

Just like Lexar's JumpDrive Lightning, the Secure II does not have a hardware encryption engine, meaning that there is a performance penalty when reading from or writing to an encrypted vault.  How bad of a penalty is it?  Take a look at the table below to find out.  The top row indicates the file transfer size, the second row indicates the type of operation (read or write) and the results are reported in KB/s, higher numbers being better.

	0.5KB		32KB		256KB		2048KB		65536KB
	Read	Write	Read	Write	Read	Write	Read	Write	Read	Write
Secure	0.9	5	9078	287	10112	1852	10103	4403	9830	6554
Public	0.4	58	8779	3147	11964	7930	12425	9216	12015	9830

Interestingly enough, performance went up when looking at the 0.5KB and 32KB read tests, but for the most part, the encrypted vault is noticeably slower than accessing the public, unencrypted drive. 

Read performance is quite respectable when accessing the encrypted vault, generally only 1 - 3MB/s slower than normal, but write speed is where you truly lose a lot of performance when enabling Lexar's 256-bit encryption.  While a 256KB file can be written at a rate of 7.9MB/s on an unencrypted volume, writing the same size of file to an encrypted vault drops performance down to less than 2MB/s.

Lexar's new Dashboard also lets you encrypt individual files anywhere on your PC, as well as shred files so that they cannot be recovered through normal means of recovery after being deleted.