Jump to content

Does a fully encrypted hard drive have a higher failure rate?


potatochobit

Recommended Posts

I encrypted all the free space on a new hard drive with truecrypt

now I am getting a red flashing warning, disk is full

 

I know full disks are bad because they cannot be defragmented and such, 

but can encrypted disks be automatically defragmented to begin with?

does bitlocker have such built-in functionality?

 

 

 

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yep it's sad but TrueCrypt is not 100% uncrackable now that an audit has been published. anyone who really knows what they are doing can get in... Aka NSA. if you are just protecting your data from normal folks you are basically safe unless they know the password.

 

I don't know why yours says disc is full as it shouldn't even show up unless you mount it in windows after entering the key.

 

http://istruecryptauditedyet.com/

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I assume you did a full drive encryption, and not a file container the size of the whole drive. With that said, did you do a standard drive encryption or a hidden drive encryption? If you did a hidden drive, windows shouldn't even see the drive outside of just having something connected to that drive letter. I haven't ever done a standard full drive encryption, but I assume windows can see its there and that its encrypted. Being that its the full drive and not hidden from windows, I suspect it cant find a pagefile and just assumes the whole drive is full.

 

Now for the defragmentation, as long as you have the drive mounted, and it doesn't say the mounted drive is full you can defrag. Access it through the mounted drive letter instead of the physical drive letter and it will act as a standard drive. There should be no reason you cant defrag it, as truecrypt encrypts and decrypts all data going to and from the drive in real time based on the hash generated from the password. So for example truecrypt will pull a "7" from the disk, then tell windows its an "a", windows will tell it to put the "a" back in a new location, and truecrypt will put a "7" in that spot. Windows defrag may not want to defrag a mounted drive, but defraggler will.

 

Also if you have an encrypted file container on a disk, you can defrag the disk with the container on it without it mounted and it will be fine, but I dont know if that works with full drive. I kind of doubt it would

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...