Upgrading Your Notebook Hard Drive: The $299 Way and the $87 Way

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  1

  rambler78

  08/24/08 | Report as spam

  RE: Upgrading Your Notebook Hard Drive: The $299 Way and the $87 Way

  I don't know what to believe with this story. For now I will assume that nobody is telling lies, but there is something fishy if that's the case. Otherwise: see end.
  
  No sleight against TrueCrypt, but the $212 buys you performance. Hardware based encryption in the hard drive will not use any CPU cycles to encrypt your data, TrueCrypt will use CPU cycles to encrypt your data.
  
  If you are going to encrypt your data and you *really* care about how hard it will be to crack consider that TrueCrypt is running your choice of algorithm at 256bit, and CMS offer 128 bit AES only.
  Remember that since attacks on the TrueCrypt volume can be run offline it may be considered that any encryption method will be broken and you are only choosing how hard you make it for the attacker. Can't say how CMS organise their encryption so it may be an offline or online attack.
  
  If you are running a multiboot environment TrueCrypt may present problems (?possibly fixed since I last checked?) whereas hardware will run from the hardware, no OS interaction so no hassle.
  But wait... CMS offer hardware encryption that is Windows compatible only??? SATA is SATA is SATA. Any OS that can interface with SATA through a BIOS can interface with SATA through the BIOS. So how can this offering from CMS give hardware encryption, but not offer it to all OSs without bias?
  
  Someone please tell me where I'm wrong (politely). The site seems a little light on the technical info I seek.

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  2

  BizHacksRick

  08/25/08 | Report as spam

  RE: Upgrading Your Notebook Hard Drive: The $299 Way and the $87 Way

  Hmmm...interesting points. I don't know enough about the CMS product to provide answers. My point here was simply that it's possible to cobble together a DIY upgrade that costs considerably less than a kit but accomplishes more or less the same thing. I can't imagine TrueCrypt incurs much of a performance hit. As for 128-bit AES versus 256-bit, the former is plenty secure for the vast majority of business users. IMHO, of course.