Angelo’s blog

Last week, I got a 250GB FreeCom USB2 harddisk at work. We were going to ship the disk to a customer, and the customer would send it back, with confidential data on it. Usually, I’m not that paranoid, but I like to keep my customer’s mission-critical confidential data secure, especially if I’m shipping the disk using normal low-cost shipping service. With TPG Post here in the Netherlands, it’s not that uncommon for packages to just go missing.. And even if it doesn’t go missing, I still don’t trust all postal service employees..

A logical thing to do, was to create a TrueCrypt volume on the disk, and place the data in that volume. I wanted to convince my customer that TrueCrypt is not only a secure, but also a fast tool to secure data.

The funny thing is, I couldn’t find any basic benchmarks on USB2 disks, let alone in comparison to encrypted volumes. So I created a volume myself, and benched it with ATTO Disk Benchmark.

This is the disk attached to my Dell Optiplex GX620 (Dual Core 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM). I didn’t tune anything, just plugged the disk in the back of my computer, and went ahead. The disk is formatted as one big NTFS volume.

Then I created a 100GB TrueCrypt volume, using default AES. Took a while to format the volume, but that’s not the strange considering the fact that a 100GB of data has to written. After that I mounted the volume, and did the same test:

Reads perform at 63%, and writes perform at 69% of the speed on the unencrypted volume, looking at big files. In this case, my client’s data consists of one huge file. In my opinion, these rates are quite acceptable, and I feel confident to tell my customer that this solution is ‘fast’ as well.