IT departments rolling out fleets of W700’s will appreciate its remote manageability. Note there’s no “lock” function within the utility-the OS partition will re-lock itself the minute you remove the drive from the USB port. I used the Admin unlocker, which simply renders the Windows portion of the drive visible so you may install the OS. which will install the operating system on up to 14 drives simultaneously. Provisioning-installing Windows onto the larger portion of the drive-requires IronKey’s freely downloadable Admin Unlocker utility, or licensing the company’s Workspace provisioning tool. If that proves the case with your PC, you can always invoke the BIOS or a boot menu by pressing function keys immediately after turning on your computer (typically Del, F2, F8, F11, etc.). There is, however, a 500MB partition that is always visible under Windows Explorer which provides a bit of single-boot storage, contains a utility to unlock the W700’s operating system partition for the next boot, and also provides a utility that will change the BIOS so that it selects the W700 as the next boot media. Alas, the latter utility didn’t work with my Gigabyte GA-Z77n-WiFi’s BIOS. If you don’t require the security, or are half-hearted about it, go another route because the dual-boot will annoy you in the long run.

While eminently secure, Windows on the W700 takes longer to get up and running than a normal Windows To Go drive, because it requires two boots: one to unlock the operating system partition, and the second to boot into Windows.

Ironkey basic