ok, i have an external hardrive which i take with me to school it holds many of my major projects
i'm wondering if there is a way to password protect it so nosy peeps cant just jump on the comp and get into my stuff.

its a seagate free agent 320gb if that helps

 

I am not sure about your question, but I will try to find out.

I do have a question for you though, How do you like your particular HD?

I am looking to get one and Seagate is one that I am looking at. Do you have any problems with crashing or having to reboot to access or anything? Is the speed ok? How long have you had it?

Anything you can provide would be a great help. I just need something to store pictures and home videos.

 

There are ways of encrypting/password protecting any hardware drive, but most of its software driven unless the drive came with the encryption built in.

Some of the newer laptops have hardware encryption built into the drive itself, so you cant access it with another computer.

As for external drives, the biggest issue for speed will be the age/condition ofyour system. I have several external drives, and I've found the newer USB 2.0 drives run very well when connected to a USB 2.0 port on a desktop/laptop. Any other kind of USB port however and it runs like crap.

I'm still very partial to firewire, and prefer to use it as its still faster then USB. Most of my firewire stuff is Firewire 400, but my music drive at home is a Firewire 800 drive, which is like having the drive inside my PC.

 

Format to NTFS and set perms.. should work i guess, havent tried it though

 

It will work, however, if he is logged in, and someone sits down, they will have access to his drive.

If he sets it to only allow his access, and logs off, then it should work....but if its at a school, I cant verify it because its all about how the administrators of the computers have things setup.

 

I thought NTFS was based on the perms set on the drive rather than on the comp. so if you password protected a directory and u "mounted" the drive on a diffrent XP machine or similar, it would still prompt for password of the folder no? 128bit encryption? man its been a long time since ive messed with perm,, back in the MCSE days lol

 

thanks i'll fiddle a bit,
I love this drive, i've got all my "donor" images and files on it, my entire portfolio, a bunch of music, a couple videos, 3d animation files....
and still barely scratched the total memory available
it is usb 2.0
sometimes i notice its slow but only when im using most of my 1.5 Gb or ram

 

Check out this software: http://www.truecrypt.org/

 

but will it work on a drive that does not have windows?

 

From their FAQ:

If you're asking if it has to have windows installed on the drive to encrypt it the answer is no. My friend uses it on his computer and on his external drive just fine, you just have to remember to do the safe remove thing in truecrypt before you unplug it.