GuardKey USB Encryption Dongle For Drives and Cloud Review

Performance

There will naturally be some sort of performance loss from the encryption process, but how much will depend on your available CPU power. When copying a mixture of small and large files in my test setup, I saw a performance within the protected folders between 20MB/s and 170MB/s while I got around 40MB/s to 210MB/s outside the file locker.

While that is somewhat of a performance hit, it’s still speeds that are highly acceptable, especially considering this is designed for personal files and folders rather than large collections of files.

The file lockers are created locally, so you naturally don’t have them when on the go – unless you created them on the 8GB partition on the drive or in the cloud. Installing the app on another system allows you to create local and password protected lockers there too and so on.

The only downside to this method is that you have to install the application onto your system, which might not be possible on systems that aren’t your own. It would have been great if there was a portable executable that didn’t require an installation onto the target system. Perhaps in the future.