Kanguru Defender 3000 – 128 GB Hardware Encrypted Flash Drive - FIPS 140-2 Level 3 Certified - SuperSpeed USB 3.0 – Water Resistant

This is a great USB stick for wedding videos. I did not realize how hard it would be to find a USB drive with a write lock until I started looking; back in the day almost all of them had it but I guess people didn't realize how important that little switch is so manufacturers stopped adding it to their flash drives.I would have preferred a less industrial looking drive to send to my wedding video clients but I had to settle for this drive since I would prefer ruggedness over looks. The way I use this drive is I place all of the client's wedding videos on it, double check everything to make sure that it works then slide the lock switch to the locked position. My last step is to put two drops of super glue on the lock switch to prevent it from being unlocked.This approach ensures the client cannot get infected with malware, does not find a way to damage the file / folder structure on the USB drive, and ensures that the drive is read only.

I selected this model as it has a switch on it to make it "read-only". As a computer tech, I can plug this into any machine and not have "cooties" jump on it. I wish the switch had a bit more of a "click" to it, but it has never moved itself to another position without my intervention.At one time I had a PQI model, but it was very, very slow compared to this.Also, any time it is reading or writing a red light in the end flashes to let you know it is busy. It is bright enough, ...but not too bright.

I support a lot of systems around the world that use Windows-based PCs and I run into a lot of viruses and trojans on those systems. For that reason it is really important to me to have a write-protectable drive that is not subject to being compromised by BadUSB, but something on which I can periodically update files as some of my software is updated. The Kanguru drives excel in both these areas. This isn't my first experience with Kanguru drives; I have some of the older, smaller-capacity models that are only USB 2.0 speed and not quite as secure.Because I have the older drives I am accustomed to the older User Interface for logging in to the drive. It was simple, would allow you to use whatever you want as a password (I prefer to use very long passphrases, about 80 characters), and very simply opened the drive for use afterwards. The new UI throws most of that away. Now, you are forced to use what Kanguru believes to be the more secure model of UPPER and lower case, plus at least one number and one special character. Contrary to popular belief this scenario is actually less secure because people have a hard time remembering passwords in that format so will either write them down and/or reuse the same password for many things (banking, work, etc.). Further that, once you can figure out your password and log in you have to wait while the UI tries to connect to an anti-virus server, and deal with a couple dialogs if/when it can't. You cannot turn off this feature. It's nice that it's included but one should be able to turn it off, particularly when dealing with systems that have no Internet connection as a security precaution. It's so bad that my immediate impulse was to return the drive. Instead I kept it but I don't use it nearly as much as the older one which was much smaller and frequently filled up. When this one fails or becomes too small for my needs I won't be going back to Kanguru for a replacement. I'd rather go back to carrying a wallet of DVDs.So, a Five-plus star product hampered by a two-star User-Unfriendly Interface equals 4 stars.

Like many IT professionals, I'm constantly working on infected machines and keep my toolkit on a flash drive. Worried about compromising my drive and then other machines, I purchased this Kanguru drive.It's 8GB (not sure where the other reviewer saw a different size), it does have an activity light when it's in use, and the physical write-protect switch works as intended.I boot from this drive as well as keep other standard programs on it, have had no issues at all. Would buy again and recommend.

Good physical security. Not easy to break or crack. Assuming user chooses a well conceived complex password, the AES 256 hardware assures strong logical security. USB 3.0 and 2.0 connectivity and 32GB storage provided easy portability of large data files. Would buy it again.

71% (so far) of these drives were defective. I ordered 21 of these drives because our company is implementing DLP and therefore shutting off write access to our USB drives. Since these drives are hardware encrypted and require the user entering a password before viewing or accessing any of the data stored on them they are exempt from the USB write restriction. I ordered myself a test device at first - which worked - and then based on that I ordered 20 more for other users. I'm still waiting to hear back from a few people, but of the 13 I've heard back from so far (plus my original) an astonishing 10 have been defective. The way these drives work is they have two partitions - a read-only partition with an application on it that asks for the password and only upon entering the correct password the read/write partition is shown. On the defective drives the read-only partition is missing the application that asks for the password. After contacting Kanguru they sent a download to a repair tool, but that errors out on these drives and the only option is to work with the manufacturer to send them back to the factory for new ones. However, with a 70%+ failure rate I'm not overly confident that the replacements will work either + plus the hassle of having to collect them all, send them back and then test and distribute all the replacements. So far I'm several hours of headache in and I'm sure there will be many more to come. For a drive that is already priced 15x the price of a non-hardware encrypted version and targeted toward enterprises you'd think their QA processes would be a little more stringent.The physical drive itself is well made, heavy and does not appear cheap in any way - which is good considering the price you pay.