“Incorporated in 1998, Addonics is a privately held company located in the Silicon Valley, California. Its mission is to provide professionals and business users a complete family of innovative storage solutions with the highest quality and best compatibility in mind. Our business focus is to deliver a family of data storage building blocks that can be easily put together to form a variety of data storage solutions. These building blocks consist of sub systems, IO converters, storage enclosures, racks, controllers, interface boards, mounting brackets, interface cables, power cables, adapters and connectors. In as much as possible, the building blocks are designed as independent modules that can be used as stand alone or combined in many possibilities, similar to the LEGO blocks, to form powerful and flexible storage solutions.”
This is the first paragraph you read when clicking the about tab on Addonic’s website. Kinda does make you go…hmm interesting. Making data storage easier. Who doesn’t want that? With storage becoming a more talked about topic these days in the tech world its not surprising more, and more companies would want to provide solutions for user’s storage needs, and wants. Now honestly when we first read the “similar to LEGO blocks” line we were like…ummm so our storage solutions will come in red, blue, and yellow? But in all seriousness providing a line of products that work with each other to maximize storage efficiency to us doesn’t sound like such a “block head” idea. See what what we did there? Ha!
Now Addonics offers an array of different solutions in regards to storage as you just read, but today we are going to focus on just one. The CipherUSB. This little bugger encrypts data on external drives which include external hard drives, flash drives, and external optical drives, and makes it so anyone who doesn’t have the CipherUSB connected to the drive which was used to write the encrypted data via the CipherUSB is out of luck. So the question is…does this work, or do we still have to worry about that upstart exec stealing our drives, and taking our ideas, and presenting them as his / her own, or even worse having our private collection of “movies”, and “pictures” discovered by our already jealous significant others? Lets find out.
Packaging & Aesthetic
Our review sample CipherUSB came in a white box with a picture of the Addonics Cipher shown in the center. The packaging is plain but do you really care if it comes in a pretty box, or that what’s inside really does what it says it does? Come on….be honest.
Opening the box reveals the CipherUSB in a protective bubble wrap, the instruction manual, and software disc.
The CipherUSB itself is about the size of your average flash drive sporting the CipherUSB name on the front, and the Addonics name on the back in a smaller font size as the CipherUSB name.
The back of the Cipher reveals the USB 2.0 docking port used to connect an external drive to it to encrypt any data on the drive, or created by the drive via optical disk as we mentioned earlier.
Removing the protective cap of the Cipher reveals the USB 2.0 connection.
