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Thread: Whole Hard Drive Encryption Questions

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    Super Moderator Jonj1611's Avatar
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    Whole Hard Drive Encryption Questions

    Hi,

    Well my neighbour was recently burgaled and they took a couple of laptops amongst other things, which has kinda made me realise that if any of my pc/laptop were stolen I wouldn't want them accessing the data.

    My pc uses Windows 7 Pro and my laptop uses Vista Home Premium.

    So, my question is, is there any software preferably free that does whole disk encryption? Of all hard drives and attached external drives, also does it cause any slow down in the drive read/write speeds on encrypted drives as I have some games on a couple of hard drives which take long enough to load as it is.

    Thanks for any help
    Jon

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    Comfortably Numb directhex's Avatar
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    Re: Whole Hard Drive Encryption Questions

    Quote Originally Posted by Jonj1611 View Post
    So, my question is, is there any software preferably free that does whole disk encryption?
    Truecrypt is a good choice, and is what I use for the Windows partition on my laptop

    also does it cause any slow down in the drive read/write speeds on encrypted drives
    Definitely - it means your CPU needs to decrypt all the data it reads, and encrypt all the data it writes, rather than just spooling data on and off. The slowdown depends on your spec.

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    Not a good person scaryjim's Avatar
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    Re: Whole Hard Drive Encryption Questions

    Truecrypt is definitely a good choice - a lot of institutions (incluing the University I work at) insist on laptop encryption with Truecrypt.

    As to slowdown - tbh I don't think it does on modern PCs. My old unit used to do a lot of disk IO intensive data analysis, and we were worried that encrypting our PCs would slow down an already slow process even further, so I did a bench test of an identical process before and after encryption. It was a 50 minute job, and after encryption it took about 10 seconds *less* then before encryption, which is within error. Of course, exact workload will make a difference to that, and I guess with a very fast drive (e.g. an SSD) you might find the slowdown more measurable, but I doubt it will make your PC *feel* any different...

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    The late but legendary peterb - Onward and Upward peterb's Avatar
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    Re: Whole Hard Drive Encryption Questions

    I'd certainly recommend TrueCrypt. You don't have to encrypt the complete disk, you could have an encrypted partition for all your user data, or even an encrypted file for sensitive data. (In the last case, the container file contains a directory like structure and stores files within it.)

    The whole container is then encrypted until it is mounted within the truecrypt application. That may be the best solution as it will have minimal impact on the operating system speed, and if set up correctly, will ensure the file is unmounted when the laptop goes to sleep. Otherwise for convenience, and encrypted data partition.

    Remember that it only protects 'data at rest'. If the laptop is accessed while the encrypted disk/partition/file is mounted, the contents are visible.

    As always, the measures are a compromise between convenience and security; inho, encrypted partitions/files offer best compromise between performance and convenience, with minimal security compromise.

    If you have one of the enterprise editions of windows 7, there is also bitlocker, but only on the higher end versions.
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    Super Moderator Jonj1611's Avatar
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    Re: Whole Hard Drive Encryption Questions

    Hi,

    Thanks for the responses, I have got Truecrypt and did do whole drive encryption and haven't noticed any slow down in speed but I am wondering if I would rather just do as PeterB said and just encrypt the user data which is all I want to do really, have encryption on the fly so to speak, so only documents/pictures are encrypted as they are written or read.

    I have Windows 7 Pro on one laptop and Vista Home Premium on the other so a third party application is probably the only route I will be able to take here.
    Jon

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