USB pen drives (also called USB keys or thumb drives) have become so cheap and readily available these days. Only a few years ago, a 16GB pen drive costed a fortune. But now even 32GB USB pen drives are selling at dirt cheap prices. The ready availability of cheap USB storage devices have made it very easy to carry your personal documents on your person inside your pen drive. But for added security, you should encrypt the documents on your pen drive so that they cannot be misused if fallen in wrong hands. The free Rohos Mini Drive software lets you keep your files in a secret encrypted partition on your USB disk drive.
The freeware Rohos Mini Drive is available for Windows in two formats – a full installer version and a small portable application. The portable edition of the Rohos Mini Drive is does not require any installation and you can just copy it to your USB pen drive and run it from there. The first thing you would want to do is to create a new secret area or partition. To do this you can select Partition → New from the menu bar to do so.
In the window that opens, you have three options – create encrypted disk inside a file, create hidden partition inside a media file (avi, mp3, wma) and create a real hidden partition. In each of these options, you can choose the size of the partition and the drive letter. As you enter the password and click OK, it will create the partition which may take some time.
Next time you start Rohos Mini Drive, it will ask for the secret partition and the password. After you supply the correct password, it will open the partition inside its own interface. You can now drag-n-drop files on the Rohos Mini Drive window to copy them to the secret partition. More commands are available for the files and folders when you right-click on them.
Conclusion: The Rohos Mini Drive is a free application that can encrypt your files on the USB drive using the powerful AES 256-bit cipher and keep them away from the snooping eyes.
You can download Rohos Mini Drive from http://www.rohos.com/products/rohos-mini-drive/.