Sony HD-EG5 and HD-EG5U External HDDs Are Encrypted

There are many things that can add to a hard disk drive's value, and Sony chose several elements when it developed the HD-EG5 and HD-EG5U, even as it kept them portable and quite capacious as well.

Sony is no stranger to the business of portable storage, and this extends to more than the DVD and Blu-ray disks involved in its PlayStation business.

The company has various other things up for sale, like external and portable hard disk drives, to give one example.

It is this very type of product that the company is now revealed to have created, complete with security features beyond what the average drive boasts.

Indeed, the Sony HD-EG5 and HD-EG5U, as the portable hard drive units are called, feature the Password Protection Manager software.

This tool provides AES 256-bit encryption and, supplemented by the Backup Manager, helps seal the products' status as secure and reliable storage devices.

Sony also threw in a special feature, the AV Link (on the HD-EG5U only), which makes it easy to stream AVCHD video to PlayStation 3 consoles.

All one needs to do is hook up the drive to a Sony Handycam (via USB), copy the video and then connect the drive to the PS3. No PC required at any stage.

As for speed, some may have already assumed that the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 iteration of the Universal Serial Bus interface is utilized, and they would be right.

What people might not immediately assume is that Sony also implemented the Data Transfer Accelerator software, which makes read and write speeds up to three times faster than normal (even on USB 2.0-up to two times).

All in all, the Sony HD-EG5 and HD-EG5U should prove to be among the fastest HDDs on the market when they start shipping in November, 2011 (next month, as it were). No pricing info yet.