[bagelred]

I have a SimpleTech External Hard Drive and doesn't seem to be any password protection option in provided software.

Anyone recommend a free, easy to use software to password protect the external? Doesn't have to be the most powerful, just something simple and easily intuitive to prevent anyone else from easily accessing the drive.

Thanks so much.

[Hefemeister]

You would need to encrypt the data on the hard drive.

I have not used any free ones but this was the first to come up on a google search.
TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux

Do a bit of research to find the best one for you.

[Yamikotai]

TrueCrypt is good, I use it.

[bagelred]

I'll show my ignorance, but what does it mean that I have to encrypt it? Does that simply mean password protection? What does encrypting do exactly?

Thanks.

[Yamikotai]

Yes, you will need to encrypt the drive - by this I mean you will need to create an encrypted volume on the drive, which will have a password (or passwords, if you want the data to be really secure). And any files you want encrypted, you simply drop into this volume.

There are very good, detailed guides on the TrueCrypt website http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/intro