Thinking About Full Drive Encryption
 

I am thinking about full drive encryption on a cheap micro notebook (the 10 inch EEPC w/ Windows) that I bought for a trip to Africa and to use whiile Sony reinvents its recalled TZ line. (Hopefully with affordable gen 2x solid state drives).

My question is whether such encryption will take much oompph out of my already undercharged processor. Don't get me wrong, the machine peppy enough right now, but I am afraid that this will be the equivalent of hitching an oversized trailer to a moderately powered six cylinder.

I'm also debating between using Truecrypt's new encryption engine (and what encryption to go with) or to pop with or to pop for Ultimaco's safeware. I bought this program for my wife's personal notebook because her company issued laptoop uses the same program and she sometimes takes her personal notebook on business trips instead of the company one. I figured if something happened, matching their encryption would stop the company from screaming too much about the security risks. I like the program, but it is expensive.

Opinions?

Boy, I would be shocked if full-drive encryption didn't bring your processor to it's knees. I've tried it on a dual-core machine before and it has been very slow.

Have you looked at other options? Depending on the amount of data that needed to be encrypted, you might look at something like an Iron Key (fully encrypted USB device). I have one and it's great because it automatically encrypts when it's removed or the machine is shut down, plus it decrypts easily when you want it to....

What program were you using? Many of them cause performance problems during initial encryption but are transparent during everyday use. I'm using PGP Whole Disk Encryption on a much less muscular machine and it's fine. Full disclosure: they're a client of mine.

Inititally encrypting the whole disk will likely cause a substantial performance hit, but that's true of any PC. Personally, when I add disk encryption to a new notebook, I plan on not even trying to use it while the disk is being encrypted initially, which can mean leaving it alone for an hour to as long as overnight. Trying to encrypt the disk in the "background" is just too painful.

Once it's encrypted, though, I doubt you'll see too much impact in day to day use. Assuming you're doing typical web browsing, word processing, and the like, your PC is almost never CPU-bound. Perfomance limiters are generally network I/ and disk I/O, and while disk reads will be slower with decryption required you're talking about 10-20-30%, not orders of magnitude slower.

You should also check out http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tom_disk&num=1 , which is right up your alley. I have no idea how good a source Phoronix is, but the article looks legit.

Bob

I used TrueCrypt to provide boot level protection on my entire drive. I have not noticed a huge impact on laptop performance, though it is pretty new and has 3GB RAM.

I put Truecrypt whole drive on a Sony SZ270P that is 2 yrs old. No noticable performance degradation.

Would you care to expand on this? All I read was that Sony had an overheating problem and was replacing TZs with new ones.

I believe the TZ is still for sale on the Sony website.

In Detroit, it is off the shelf at all the usual boxstore suspects. I'm quoting what I was told at the Sony Store. It really doesn't matter, I kind of decided to wait until next year on this purchase because I would love a decent size solid state drive and I already made this purchase.

TrueCrypt seems to work well for most people. When I used it, there was no noticeable performance hit. I stopped using it, however, because the boot loader kept getting corrupted and I needed to use the rescue CD every time I started my computer. I hear that Adobe products store their license data in the first sector of the hard drive, which is also where TC stores its boot loader. That was likely the problem.

I also use PGP WDE and have not experienced any measurable performance hit going all the way back to IBM T41's. Oh, and I have no relation to PGP Corp other than as a satisfied customer.

Sony TT With 256 GB Solid State Drive
 

Dubai Stu, sorry I doubted you. You were correct. But here's some good news since I just called Sony.

The TZ has been replaced by the TT and it has a 256 GB solid state drive.

Perhaps some more FT'ers more knowledgable than me, can look through the specs at Sony's web site.

[Mods, feel free to break this off into a new thread called "Sony TT With 256 GB Solid State Drive.]

The initial encryption will suck. Walk away for a few hours.

After that, I don't think it'll be that bad (the I/O subsystem in those things is already horridly slow--the encryption overhead is not really going to add enough to be noticeable).

Plus, the truecrypt folks just (well, a few months ago) re-implemented their AES routines in assembly (actually, they borrowed the implementation). But it made a drastic difference in speed on my personal laptops.