Victorinox has a knack for making Swiss Army knives even cooler by adding features for the modern-day utilitarian, such as flash storage. Looking back nearly two years, the company outfitted one of its multi-purpose knives with an "unhackable" drive that featured 256 AES encryption and a thermal fingerprint reader.
If someone tried their luck at penetrating its security, the device's tamper-proof design burned the memory chip to prevent data theft. The company unveiled some of its newer designs at CES 2012 and although we haven't caught wind of an upgraded self-destructing model, at least one unit is worthy of mention.
Simply called "SSD," the device spans all the way up to 1TB, providing hard drive-like capacities in what seems to be a conventional USB flash drive package (we having seen dimensions, but the knife serves as a point of reference). There are also 64, 128 and 256GB iterations, all of which connect via USB/eSATA 3.0.
"Carry your files, (like, all of your files) in your pocket, (just to be clear, we're talking about every word document, presentation, song, funny cat photo, last year's taxes, a movie, or two, or fifty, and whatever else.) Take it all with you – the SSD securely stores and transports up to 1 terabyte of data," the Swiss firm boasts.
While it may not be able to vaporize its memory on the first sign of intrusion, the SSD offers solid security courtesy of the preloaded 256 AES combination hardware and software encryption. The preinstalled Victorinox Secure suite also features automatic backups, file synchronization and a password manager.
Interestingly, the drive has a 96x48 monochrome LCD that lets you see its contents and available capacity – something unavailable elsewhere, the company says. Performance is rated at a darn respectable 220MB/s reads and 150MB/s writes, which is about as fast as you'll find from most high-end USB 3.0 drives.
Each drive ships with two interchangeable bodies: a black one with no blades and a red one with a knife, scissors, a nail file/cleaner and a screwdriver. The black housing is mostly intended for hassle-free air travel. And the moment you've been waiting for... pricing ranges from $400 to $3,000 depending on the model.