Super Talent – USB 3.0 SuperCrypt Drive

Introduction

When it comes to portable memory, it seems that there is never enough space nor speed in those tiny flash drives on the market today. Fortunately, there are companies that understand this concern and try to adapt to consumer needs. The SuperCrypt encrypts access to the data while keeping things running smoothly at USB 3.0 speeds. With the promise of transfer rates of up to 240 MB/s and large storage size, does the SuperCrypt deliver? Read on and find out.

Super Talent ST3U32SCS

Specifications

There are several things that are important about the drive. First of all is backwards compatibility. USB 3.0 is perfectly compatible with older revisions though to get the full speed USB 3.0 is required.  Another thing that is important is the capacity. While most drives today come in 4 – 8 GB, SuperTalent decided to start off in the 16 GB range. The drive that we will be testing today is 32 GB in size.

Capacities:	16 – 256GB
Dimension:	95 x 34 x 15.4mm
Technical Details:	– Full compatibility with USB 3.0 and 2.0 – Transfer speeds up to 240MB/sec in USB 3.0 – Hot plug and play; Functions like another hard drive – Slim and sleek casing style – HighSpeed Drivers Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7 (both 32 & 64 bit) – LED indicates power, busy – More than 10 years data retention – 2 years warranty

A Closer Look

The two pictures above represent the SuperTalent SuperCrypt drive in the original box. As you can see the box is plain and only list a series of features without giving any specific numbers but just from looking at the box you can see that you are looking at something that is both a quality product and large size. The flash drive itself is enclosed in a protective foam and does not come with a manual but merely a piece of paper directing you to the Super Talent’s web site to download the latest USB 3.0 drivers. As I opened up the box, one thing that struck me the most, though, was not the elegance of the box, nor the degree to which the drive was protected, but the size of the drive! Below you can see a picture of comparison between a quarter and a the drive.

Testing

The testing system for the drive was as follows:

Processor	Intel Core i7 920 2.67 GHz @ 2.67 GHz
Memory	Corsair Dominator 6 GB @ 1600 MHz
Motherboard	Asus P6T
USB 3.0 Card	Asus U3S6 x4 USB 3.0/Sata 6G Card
Hard Drive	2 X Hitaxhi HTS725050A9A364 – 7200 RPM 500GB in RAID 0

Windows copy test

Above are the results of the file transfer operation when copying multiple files versus copying a single large file. The image on the left represents the transfer rates form the SuperCrypt to the desktop at 220 MB/s. The transfer consisted of 1 1.99 GB file and 2 .txt files for the image on the left. The right side represent a transfer smaller in size but with higher complexity. The file on the right consisted of numerous Visual Basic projects that from the SuperCrypt to the desktop. When creating a new Visual Studio project, the IDE generates a series of libraries that are minuscule in size but are needed for the new application to interact with the Microsoft Framework during assembly and Design time. A mere 861 MB of data contained 7,370 items and as you can see the transfer rates were also affected. Despite that fact the SuperCrypt performed exceptionally well. The speed at which the SuperCrypt was able to transfer the files are astonishing even by SSD standards.

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HD Tune 3.0

The SuperTalent SuperCrypt performed the HD Tune read test extremely well. The speeds were at a constant 188 MB/s with a 0.2 second access time. While this test reports slower results than Windows Explorer, it does show consistency of read speeds across the drives which is a plus. In the write sector on the other hand, there are multiple spikes in speeds. As show in the picture above, the minimum write speed of the drive dipped to approximately  15 MB/s while the average hovered around 74 MB/s.

In the search to find the reasons behind the inconsistencies I continued with the file benchmark test. As you can see in the picture on the bottom, the drive performs extremely well with the maximum drive speeds being attained as soon as  64 KB segments were tested. Similarly the write speeds also leveled out near the 64 KB segment mark. The results of this test indicate that the drive would exhibit its maximum performance with file segments larger than 64 KB.

Center Caption Text Bold

TeraCopy

TeraCopy is a 3rd party software meant to increase copy speeds and reduce the time for files to copy. As you can see from the images below while copying the same files as in the previous examples, TeraCopy managed to copy a 2.85 GB (3 files) in 34.379 seconds average of 82.9MB/s. The 4.21 GB containing  7052 files were copied in 107.137 seconds at an average rate of 39.3 MB/s. The drive performed extremely well while presented with a magnitude of files that were medium sized. The files were transferred form the desktop to the flash drive.

Tera Copy – Single File Transfer

Tera Copy – Multiple file Transfer

CrystalDiskMark 3.0

CrystalDiskMark tests consist of the taking the read and write rates across a specified size portion of the hard drive. For our tests I have selected to use 1000 MB and 4000 MB sample sizes. The tests results looked very encouraging despite the fact that the SuperCrypt did not hit the magic 240 MB/s mark. Even at smaller 4K random writes the SuperCrypt performed better  or on par with value SSDs.

1000 MB Sample Size

4000 MB Sample Size

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Encryption

Now that we have spent some time looking at performance, we need to try out the other main feature of this drive. The SuperCrypt flash drive prides itself in using AES256 encryption with an 128ECB encoding algorithm. While looking at My Computer, the SuperCrypt presents itself as 2 separate hard drives. The firs hard drive is read only and contains the “password.exe” application which acts as the drive’s encryption utility.  The second drive is the used for storage and contains the bulk of the space available. which The encryption features disable the drive from being seen until the correct password is entered or the user wipes the drive. This is done through the password application as can be seen in the pictures below.

Super Talent – Hidden Drive

Super Talent – Password Unlock

The password can be reset through the password management utility. The old password is required for reset as can be seen in the picture below. If you have forgotten your password, the “password.exe” utility provides a way of deleting the application, however, it does so at the expense of wiping the data. This requires the words “ERASE MY DISK” to be written in all caps.

Super Talent – Password Management

Super Talent – Erase Disk

Security Issues

While I have nothing against the drive being designed only for Windows, there are loopholes that simply can not exist when dealing with sensitive data that was meant to be protected. Since the drive uses software based encryption using “Password.exe”, I began to wonder what would happen if I were to use an operating system that is not Windows. I therefore decided to download Ubuntu 9.10 and run it as a Live CD to find out. What I was able to discover was simply astonishing. Not only was the mass storage visible, it was also unencrypted! I was able to access the files without needing to use the password or even open up the “Read Only” drive under My Computer. After snooping through my exposed drive, I proceeded to the “Read Only” partition. There I found a couple of interesting things. The files used for encryption of the password were visible and accessible, again, without the use of the password. This is evidenced in the pictures below:

Read Only Folder on Ubuntu

Read Only Folder – Encrypted Files

Summary and Conclusion:

So after all the testing what is the bottom line? Well it is rather hard to say. While the SuperCrypt did not hit the 240 MB/s it did achieve speeds that are on the same level or beyond some SSDs and that by itself is an accomplishment worth mentioning. That being said, however, there are a few issues. First of all is the size. While I was using the drive both at work and at home anyone that saw the drive definitely noticed that it was huge. Secondly the drive prides itself in AES 256 bit encryption which is extremely difficult to hack even with super computers, but then it uses a method which does not guarantee complete encryption. In fact after taking a closer look at the drive in Ubuntu, one of the few things that was completely encrypted was the just the password but not the files. Thirdly is the price tag. Coming in at around$172 it is definitely at a premium, which would have been fine since there is no price on anonymity but given the security holes the SuperTalent’s SuperCrypt just can not stand up to other drives in its category that come at a cheaper price.

When it is all said and done we like the drive’s storage and speed but the pricetag and encryption need a bit of work. Taking into consideration that other 32GB drives can be found at a significantly reduced price and size we find it hard to justify purchasing the SuperCrypt at this time. Super Talent needs to rework the software and pricetag and then the SuperCrypt will live up to its name and be worth your money.

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