Windows 7: Win 7, Encryption and SSD

Hello,

I hope I've managed to choose the correct place for this post, else please direct me :-)

Now, I was planning to utilize TrueCrypt for complete drive-encryption on my Win 7 installation. I don't have a motherboard with an option to utilize Bitlocker.

However, seen reviews and benches in this regard put a sad smiley on my face - damn those SSD's seem to run poorly with full drive encryption on Win with Truecrypt.

What options do I have? A container-solution is not useable in my case, I do need complete drive encryption (or at least system-partition encryption).

I also read some negative stuff on wear and tear, trim etc. when using encryption.

Thanks in advance.



Best regards,

Hi tuxxdk welcome to Sevenforums.

Personally, I would go with Bitlocker, I use it myself and there is little to no slowdown, I mean if its there, we are talking milliseconds.

As for not having a TPM motherboard, don't worry about that. We have a tutorial made by our very own Brink which will show you how to turn that particular check off, all you will need is a USB flash drive (In fact, you don't even need that, I use an SD card as my key): BitLocker Drive Encryption - Windows 7 Drive - Turn On or Off with no TPM

Hope this helps

Thanks for the welcome, severedsolo!

I will definitely look closer on that guide tomorrow if I can find time for it, and then I'll return with the results. Thanks for the link!

I wasn't aware that it was possible without a TPM-capable motherboard.

If I run sour with Bitlocker, do you have any experience with Truecrypt and SSD's?

Thanks again for that excellent guide. It's most helpful!

As promised, here is an update.

Bitlocker works so far - it's setup and has completed encryption. Great :-)

Now all's left is some benchmarking.

Great forum this is - thanks again :-)

To wrap things up, I did some benchmarking (read-tests) on my SSD drive. With encryption (eCryptFS) on Linux I had ~270MB/sec, but with encryption on Windows (Bitlocker 256bit w/difuser) I have around 170MB/sec.

That's ALOT performance-hit, however, the system still seems snappy and very fast, so I've decided to leave it that way for now. I can and will not go the non-encryption way, so it's a "take it or leave it"-situation :-)