Product Review: VAVA Touch SSD UM-004 Secure Portable Storage Drive

By Steven Stromer, Mar 25, 2023

The VAVA Touch SSD UM-004 is an extremely small solid state external storage device. It's capabilities, performance and design are all well documented, so I'll skip ahead to my experience.

The Touch SSD has been on the market since 2020. It began as an Indiegogo-funded project, and I remember being excited when I first learned about it for it's most notable feature: a fingerprint sensor for securing the drive's contents.

This past holiday season, the Touch was available at a too-good-to-pass sale price, and I finally took the bait, buying two for redundant backup. I am well aware of the many, significantly more robust backup options available; I have (through gritted teeth) configured more than my share of drive arrays, in just about every arrangement that RAID offers. Here, I simply needed a small, low energy, solution that would be practical and convenient to use with a constantly moving laptop.

VAVA supplies OSX and Windows versions of the software that configure's the drive's security features. It is with this software that my experience went southward. I spent hours trying to get the software to recognize the device on my OSX MacBook. The software, unfortunately was developed before Apple implemented System Integrity Protection (SIP), and it has not been updated since the product's release. VAVA's installation guide instructs OSX users to grant permission to the software, but this preference option has since been deprecated by Apple.

The VAVA software installs successfully, but it just doesn't have the kernel-level permissions needed to recognize the Touch's fingerprint security sensor device. Consequently, the drive mounts, but without it's intended security capabilities.

I reached out to VAVA, but they were less than helpful, responsive or candid. Despite still selling the device on their website and through other outlets, their engineering department reluctantly acknowledged that they had looked into addressing the issue for some time. Then, apparently, they just gave up, without making sure that related sales and marketing materials were updated to reflect this incompatibility.

I was frustrated, tired of feeling like a tech guinea pig, whose time is seemingly now considered by many product manufacturers to be of little value or consequence. However, in the depths of my frustration with the VAVA Touch SSD, a simple and very obvious solution (in retrospect) presented itself; set up the device's security features on a Windows machine, and then use it on the Mac.

This solution worked in only minutes. The Windows version of VAVA's configuration software installed and worked without a hitch. The drive was recognized and fingerprint profiling was completed in minutes.

Further, VAVA has confirmed that they will not honor the product's warranty when purchased from a third-party seller, as it is being sold here.

Hours of my time wasted. Sharing this to save yours.