Setup & Usage
To get things started with the diskashur DT2 you’ll need to plug it into power and then plug the USB cable into any open USB port on your PC, preferably a USB 3.1 port. Now go ahead and flip the power switch on the back of the unit. Most other external hard drives would automatically be recognized by Windows, but not the diskashur DT2. You’ll notice a red indication LED on the top of the unit that lets you know it is locked.
To unlock to the drive for the first time you’ll need to enter the default Admin PIN, which is “11223344”. Once entered correctly, you’ll see the green and blue LEDs blink several times and then finally change to a solid green LED. This means that the drive is unlocked. You can change the Admin PIN or add a new user PIN in addition to the Admin PIN.
Once unlocked Windows will recognize the drive and it should pop right up. Taking a look at the drive we have 7.27 TB of usable space. On the drive you will find a PDF version of the user’s guide.
The drive has some pretty cool security features with the first being a self-destruct PIN. This PIN will perform a crypto-erase on the entire drive as well as delete all data, admin / user PINs and then unlock the drive. The self-destruct PIN will then become the new user PIN.
The next is brute force protection. If an incorrect PIN is entered 15 (3 x 5 PIN clusters) consecutive times, then all Admin/User PINs, the encryption key and all data will be deleted and lost forever. The drive will then need to be formatted and partitioned before it can be reused.
Finally you have the unattended auto-lock clock. Basically the drive will lock itself after a set amount of time. This prevents unauthorized access if the drive is unattended for a long period of time. You have the ability to set the time for the auto-lock clock.
To test the performance of the drive we will be using CrystalDiskMark and the USB storage benchmark. These should give us a good idea of why speeds you can expect from the drive. Up first we have CrystalDiskMark.
As you can see we have average speeds around 185 MB/s. Now for the USB Flash Benchmark.
You can see that the drive does pretty well through the 16M – 512KB file transfers, but seems to tail off after that. iStorage states this drive is rates for average read / write speeds of 225 MB/s and 223 MB/s respectively so I am not sure why my drive would max out around 180 MB/s. We first had it connected to a USB 3.1 gen 2 port on an X299 motherboard and then to another USB 3.1 gen 2 port on a brand new X570 motherboard. Maybe there are different speed ratings for different capacities?
