Hands On Review of the LaCie FastKey USB 3.0 SSD

This started up the LaCie Setup Assistant. The LaCie Setup Assistant software must be launched. It will:

Easily format your storage device according to your needs.
Copy the User Manual and software utilities onto the storage device.

Once LaCie Setup Assistant has finished formatting your storage device, you

The first time you need to make a decision when you are asked to optimize the drive – do you want to use just Windows, or share it with Mac and Linux? You can also move the slider to change the amount of space used by each partition.

Then it’s just a case of waiting for the process to complete – it doesn’t take long!

You will then see the contents of the drive now contains:

At this point you can just start using the drive. LaCie also provide disk encryption which you can use it if you want to protect your data. Now given the drive is 120GB in size, there is a good chance you might use it to carry personal data around with you, in which case you definitely want to encrypt a portion of the drive.

Encrypting the FastKey

To encrypt a portion of the drive, you use the included LaCie Private-Public application. LaCie Private-Public allows you to create a password-protected volume on your LaCie disk called LA-PRIVATE. Once created, LA-PRIVATE will use AES 256 encryption to keep your most important files safe.

So the first thing you need to do here is decide how big you want the encrypted partition to be, then you must enter a password.

Next step is the formatting of the encrypted partition.

According to the manual, the estimated time to create the LA-PRIVATE volume is one minute per Gigabyte (GB). For example, 1 GB = 1 minute, 50 GB = 50 minutes, and 500 GB = 8 hours.

And that’s it. Then when you want to access that partition you just enter your password.

And to close it you just click on the task tray.

And that’s it – you now have an encrypted partition.