Recently we looked at eight different encrypted portable drives, and Apricorn's Aegis Vault landed in the middle, in fourth place.

Take the company's Aegis Bio (our second-place choice) and remove its fingerprint reader, and you have the Aegis Vault ($260 for 500GB). The two models are virtually identical, but in this case you must submit a password to unlock the drive.

In many respects the Aegis Vault is a decent, slightly pricier duplicate of Seagate's Maxtor BlackArmor (our Best Buy pick) and its basic features, but with a convenient built-in USB cable.