truecrypt and t23

[czukuczuku]

hi yea, i was thinking lately about installing above app, but im note sure how this would affect such a slow machine like t23, as even now it slows down pretty much (wich is a bit strange for me as its got 768mb ram, 1ghz cpu, 5400rpm hdd) when i just have 10 tabs in browser, mail client and online communicator opened. so does anyone got experiense with truecrypt on t23? what are you feelings about it? much slower or acceptable? eventualy maybe better set up hdd password in bios, this doeasnt affect speed at all, right?



cheers

[Soul_Est]

I don't think it'll work. TrueCrypt uses quite a bit of CPU when being used for Full Drive Encryption (or even on a small volume). As your T23 already slows to claw with what you're doing on it, I would advise to stick with the harddrive password and remove the password when you get rid of the machine (if you do).

[ThinkRob]

Give it a shot. The CPU is certainly capable of encrypting/decrypting data with AES-128 at speeds *well* above the max speed of your hard drive.

Now how much overhead it imposes and whether it's acceptable to you -- that is something that only your experimentation can answer.

My suspicion is that CPU power isn't going to be your limiting factor. People tend to *vastly* overestimate the demands of encryption on modern-ish (P3 onwards) CPUs.

My 600X uses full disk encryption with absolutely no noticeable performance hit. Disk IO is slow because... well... a PATA drive on a c. 2000 controller can only do so much, not because of CPU limits. Sure, if I had a SATA III SSD that could pump out several hundred MB/s for sequential reads it would be a problem. But I don't, so it's not.

If you decide against full disk encryption, I also wouldn't bother with a hard drive password since it's little more than a false sense of security. They won't stop anyone who cares from accessing your data, so you're really only trying to deter computer-illiterate thieves -- and those guys don't care about your data since they're probably just going to sell it at the nearest pawn shop.

[coolhand]

Don't mean to bump an old thread, but my two cents says it won't be a problem. I run a T23 using FDE with Debian, and it's only as slow as it usually is, being a T23