Rather than carrying around an unencrypted file with you, you should stop doing that. Data loss can have a range of consequences, from being embarrassing to damaging to potentially opening your company to legal problems.

It used to be difficult to encrypt data on external drives. The problem was that you had to run an application that sometimes would not work on certain platforms, and everything turned into a huge hassle.

However, those days are gone. Encrypting your data is incredibly easy with a drive like the new Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 SSD.

SSDs usually don't have screens, but this one has one. The device, in fact, is a touchscreen, and you use it to input your passcode and make changes to the drive's settings.

The drive is very easy to use with this feature. I have never encountered an encrypted SSD that is easier to use. After I entered my secret passcode, the setup took seconds, and the server was ready to receive data.

This drive uses a USB to power itself so there is no battery to wear out or to charge. It comes with a USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A cable (and a cool neoprene carry case).

XTS-AES hardware encryption secures the data on the drive, and FIPS 197 certification confirms the drive's security. In addition to offering protection against attacks such as BadUSB, it also offers protection against brute force attacks.

In my testing, I was able to reach speeds of about 230MB/s. The drive is rated at around 250MB/s.

There are many nice features on the drive, including a randomized on-screen keyboard (so finger smudges won't reveal your password), a read-only mode so no data (or malware) can be written to the drive and an automatic timeout.