Pen Drive Unlocker

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on August 18, 2011

Portable storage devices can be a blessing and a curse. They're a convenient way to back up data and make files portable, but they can also introduce malware to your computer and let people easily copy files that they're not supposed to remove. Pen Drive Unlocker is a simple utility that lets users lock and unlock their computer's USB ports, protecting their machines from the unauthorized use of external storage devices.

There's not much to Pen Drive Unlocker, really; the interface consists of a small rectangle with a drop-down menu that lets you select Normal, Read Only, and Disable. Choose your option, click the Save button, and that's it. We tried out all three options and found that they worked as expected; Read Only let us access the contents of our USB drive but not save any new files to it, and Disable prevented the drive from being recognized at all. The Normal setting restored typical USB port use. The program doesn't have a Help file or any other features, and we would have been a little more comfortable with it if it had come with some documentation. Still, if you're looking for a simple way to control the use of external USB devices, it doesn't get much easier than Pen Drive Unlocker.

Pen Drive Unlocker comes as a ZIP file. It's accessible after extraction with no need for installation, which means that the program itself can be stored on a USB drive for portable use.