Corsair Showcase SSD and Padlock Flash Drive at Computex 2016

Among other things, Corsair had brought their enthusiast SSD with them to Computex, the new Neutron XTi solid state drive. The drive in itself is an upgraded version of the XT and it is a great drive for what it is: an SATA3 2.5-inch solid state drive. I was a little disappointed that Corsair didn’t bring any NVMe drives along and it makes one wonder a little about what their future plans are within the storage sector.

That said, the Neutron XTi is a great drive powered by a quad-core controller that supports end-to-end data protection. The drive is also protected from sudden power loss, features ECC and both static and dynamic wear-leveling for a sustained performance over the entire lifetime of the drive.

The Corsair Padlock 3 is a little more interesting as it breaks the norm of available flash drives. Sure, there are other similar drives on the market, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t use another one and especially one that will be more widely available thanks to Corsair’s distribution network.

The Padlock 3 is a USB 3.0 flash drive with built-in 256-bit AES hardware encryption and housed in a ruggedized rubber case. That gives you as the user of the drive a total protection, both from physical damage and from malicious people wanting access to your files. And in this case, it is truly hardware encryption. The Padlock 3 comes with a physical keypad from where you can enter the pin code to unlock the drive.

You don’t need any drivers or other software thanks the clever design, and that makes it truly plug and play. The way a portable drive should be at all time. It isn’t much use to bring a drive with files along that can’t be accessed when you need to.

Stay tuned for more Computex 2016 coverage.