Questions about TrueCrypt on a SSD

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DavidW

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May 30, 2011
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Will whole disk encryption on a ssd kill the drive faster? I recently got a laptop and would like to be able to "whole disk encrypt" it and not have to worry about changing all my passwords if the laptop gets stolen.
 
TRIM will not work because there will be nothing to trim. As long as you got a modern 128GB or larger SSD I would not worry about life expectancy. Or to put it another way the SSD should last longer than the laptop.
 
No, it won't kill the drive faster. The initial system encryption will of course write to every sector, but that's a one time thing, so maybe a tiny bit faster. The issues with SSDs are data leakage due to wear leveling, which you can avoid if you encrypt before storing any sensitive information, and TRIM causing free areas to be all zeroes, which lets a person distinguish used from unused areas, which I don't really care about. The TrueCrypt site has articles on both these things.

TRIM definitely works in Windows 7 on TrueCrypted SSDs. The TrueCrypt documentation explicitly states it doesn't block TRIM on devices within the scope of system encryption. When I look at the encrypted system partitions on my two SSDs (Samsung 830 and Intel X25-M) outside of Windows and unmounted in TrueCrypt, I find a ton of zeroed sectors, and my image backups of these unmounted partitions reflect this in their compression statistics. (The imaging software can't see the file system, so it has to back up every last sector.) Both drives have but a single partition, and one of the drives is formatted to capacity. The zeroed sectors have to be due to TRIM.
 
TRIM definitely works in Windows 7 on TrueCrypted SSDs. The TrueCrypt documentation explicitly states it doesn't block TRIM on devices within the scope of system encryption.
Click to expand...

That is good to know that TrueCrypt supports trim when used as whole disk encryption. Thanks for the correction.
 
crawfish said:
No, it won't kill the drive faster. The initial system encryption will of course write to every sector, but that's a one time thing, so maybe a tiny bit faster. The issues with SSDs are data leakage due to wear leveling, which you can avoid if you encrypt before storing any sensitive information, and TRIM causing free areas to be all zeroes, which lets a person distinguish used from unused areas, which I don't really care about. The TrueCrypt site has articles on both these things.

TRIM definitely works in Windows 7 on TrueCrypted SSDs. The TrueCrypt documentation explicitly states it doesn't block TRIM on devices within the scope of system encryption. When I look at the encrypted system partitions on my two SSDs (Samsung 830 and Intel X25-M) outside of Windows and unmounted in TrueCrypt, I find a ton of zeroed sectors, and my image backups of these unmounted partitions reflect this in their compression statistics. (The imaging software can't see the file system, so it has to back up every last sector.) Both drives have but a single partition, and one of the drives is formatted to capacity. The zeroed sectors have to be due to TRIM.
Click to expand...

I was thinking of doing a full disk TrueCrypt on an Intel X18-M with my laptop. The laptop supports FDE, but the drive doesn't so that brings me to TrueCrypt. Are you sure trim would still work, considering everything on the drive is scrambled? Do you remember what kind of speed hit you got before and after?
 
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