Ransom Shield will begin selling external hard drives in the first quarter of 2025. The initial price will be $150 for a 512GB device. A 1TB SKU will be available in the 2nd quarter. Even though the Ransom Shield solution supports most external USB devices, it will be highly recommended to sell the device offered by the Ransom Shield site. This device has a USB 3.1 interface containing an NVMe drive. It was selected because it's very fast and has now been well tested with the Ransom Shield solution. An additional benefit is that the device is toolless, meaning the NVMe drive can be removed from the enclosure and replace the internal drive (on systems that support NVMe drives).
The shipping drive will NOT be branded with the Ransom Shield logo. For a small charge, we may be able to customize the branding with your company name and logo.
The Ransom Shield device will also ship with a USB cable that supports both USB-A and C connections.
3rd Party Devices
If the choice is made to purchase 3rd party external devices, there are 3 primary considerations to consider.
Device capacity, device connectivity, and device form factor.
Device Capacity
The backup device needs to be large enough to contain all the system files and data on your PC.
A basic check of the used space will give you the information you need.
In the example above, Ransom Shield would support a 512GB drive for this system. There would not be much free space left, so you might want to consider a larger 1TB drive.
Device Connectivity
The types of USB ports available on your PC will determine the speed of your backup device. Type-A ports are available on older PCs and allow slower USB 3.0 connections. Type-C ports are on most newer PCs and allow faster USB 3.1, 3.2 and 4.0 connections.
Faster connections mean faster backup times and faster boot times when running from the backup drive. Adapters can be used to connect USB 3.1 and higher devices to USB 3.0 ports, but the device will always run at the slowest connection speed.
USB 3.0 USB 3.1 USB 3.2 USB 4.0
5Gbps 10Gbps 20Gbps 40Gbps
Device Form Factor
If malware infects your system drive, the best practice is to remove and dispose of the physical drive from the PC. You can continue to work indefinitely by booting from your external Ransom Shield drive.
Once you replace the infected drive with a new clean drive, you can restore your PC from the booted backup drive to the new drive. Ransom Shield allows you to launch a restore process with just a few clicks. When this process completes, you can restart and run from your new internal drive.
Some users may want to immediately replace their infected system drive with their backup drive. To do this, you would need to remove the backup drive from the external enclosure, open the PC, then install it as a replacement drive.
If your disaster plan involves using the external drive as a replacement drive, you will need to ensure that the form factor of the backup drive matches the system drive.
Systems with NVMe drives would need an external NVMe drive, and so forth.
Please note that Ransom Shield does not require the same form factor of backup drive. This is only necessary if you want to replace your system drive with the backup drive in the event of a disaster. Most users will not need this as the booted external drive can restore to a new internal drive irregardless of the drive form factor.
