It's not enough that solid state drives are faster and tougher than their spinning hard drive forebears. RunCore has found a cool way to make external SSDs even more secure.
The company's secret weapon is the Xapear Solid State Disc drive, a portable storage unit that uses RFID tags to access a hidden partition which is otherwise invisible. Slide the tag across the surface of the drive and the invisible partitition becomes visible on your system. Swipe it again, and it goes back into hiding. Viola! (You can see the swipe-to-hide feature in action in the video below.)
The new Xapear's second trick is a remote wipe command that can be executed via text message. The device contains a GSM SIM card. A GSM smartphone (one that's pre-defined by the user) can then access the drive, detect use, and even send a self-destruct command that will wipe bits remotely. The feature does not work with non-GSM phones, but AT&T and T-Mobile users in the U.S. can take advantage of the text-based security.
Speaking of taking advantage of the Xappear's features, there's no word on the on-sale date, price, or even storage capacity options. What we do know is that the drive, disappointingly, connects to computers over USB 2.0 rather than the faster USB 3.0 standard.
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