Buffalo announces rugged MiniStation Extreme NFC USB 3.0 hard drive

While many people focus on speed and capacity when buying storage devices, an often overlooked aspect is security. Of course, not everything necessarily needs to be encrypted and protected; while Aunt Edith's recipes and your family reunion photos are valuable to you, they aren't exactly the target of hackers or rogue government nations.

If you do need to encrypt and protect files, however, there are many options available to you. Today, Buffalo announces a unique drive, which offers NFC to securely access the hardware-encrypted drive. Rather than using biometrics or a password, an NFC smart card is all you need to unlock the rugged, water and dust resistant, military-grade MiniStation Extreme NFC USB 3.0 hard drive.

"The MiniStation Extreme NFC sports top-of-the-line protection standards for operation in harsh environments, such as the outdoors or the cargo hold of a plane. Its ruggedized chassis and specialized internal bumpers follow the U.S. Military Standard for shock defense. When accidentally bumped or dropped from up to 1.2 meters, the MiniStation Extreme NFC absorbs and transfers the resulting shock away from the hard drive, safeguarding the stored data. Moreover, it adheres to the IPX3 standard for resistance against water and the IP5X standard for protection against dust, protecting data on the device under any conditions", says Buffalo.

The company says, "built-in NFC technology allows users to easily unlock files using the included smart card without having to remember a password. This capability also protects valuable data from being accessed by an unauthorized user. Users can securely ship information by sending the hard drive and smart card separately, ensuring the data is protected even if the hard drive is lost or stolen".

While NFC is brilliant for physically shipping a hard drive -- sending the card in a separate mailing is genius -- I am dubious about its use outside of that case. If the card is lost, or a disgruntled employee destroys it, you could be left in quite the bad situation.

Without an alternative way to unlock the drive, you had better be extremely confident and trusting of the NFC card. You cannot use a smartphone's NFC as an alternative, sadly.

[UPDATE] Buffalo tells BetaNews, "if the NFC card is lost, the user can still access the stored files by entering a password that they designated during setup, assuming they had set a password.  The user does have the option to allow access to the hard drive through the smart card exclusively".

In other words, you should probably set up an alternative password just in case, however, you can go NFC-only if you prefer.

Luckily, pricing is very competitive -- the 1TB model is $129.99 and the 2TB model is $199. This is rather affordable for a rugged drive with 256-bit AES data encryption.

Do you like the idea of using NFC to lock/unlock encrypted files? Tell me in the comments.