It’s only been a few days since we reviewed the

, the world’s first 18TB internal hard drive, which also proved to be one of the fastest HDDs we’ve ever tested.

Now Apricorn has taken an unknown 18TB hard disk drive and dropped it into an external enclosure, creating the world’s largest

on sale right now.

You can, of course, get your own drive and put it in an external chassis, but that’s not the point.

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The

Aegis Padlock DT FIPS

is not your standard drive. It offers software-free, 100% hardware-based 256-bit AES XTS encryption, with an onboard keypad PIN (rather than a fingerprint reader) and ultra-fast USB 3.2 data transfer speeds.

All the data is encrypted on the fly (and at rest) and remains on the device itself – and that includes the PIN. The drive is completely cross-platform compatible and agnostic by nature, making it a great

too.

But the most important quality, perhaps, is that it cannot be tampered with easily, as the internal components are protected with a layer of hardened epoxy and the proprietary firmware – Aegisware – is locked down to prevent any possible malware attacks.

How much does it cost? A cool $1,199 (about £957/ AU$1679) with free delivery in the US, including a three-year warranty, which is about twice what you can expect to pay for the bare 18TB hard drive.

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