Making your portable data more secure, in a flash

ATLANTA - Flash memory drives, the size of your thumb, are dirt cheap and offer gigabytes of storage. It's tempting to fill one of them with important computer files, clip it to a key chain and hit the road.

But what if you lose it while fumbling for change at Starbucks and the hacker in the corner finds it? This is not a good thing.

That's where a new breed of flash drives comes in - chock full of military-strength encryption and passwords and keypad combinations that must be entered to access data.

I put a few secure flash drive solutions to the test: Take Anywhere's Pocket Safe ($59.95), the IronKey ($149)...