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I'm encrypting in-place a 1.5 TB partition on a non-system drive with TrueCrypt.

The problem is that the data became inaccessible the moment I started it, and that I can't revert the process nor access the data until it is complete.

The big problem is that it taking 36 hours and I don't understand why. My CPU has AES encryption ops built-in and can encrypt over 3 GB per second. The hard drive is a normal HD, but it takes nowhere near 36 hours to write 1.5 TB of data.

I believe it is going slow on purpose to avoid slowing down the computer. But since I can't use that hard drive anyway, and the bottleneck will surely be the hard drive write speed rather than the CPU, I want it to go as fast as possible.

How can I do that?

Screenshot

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What's your CPU usage currently at? This is not normal behaviour, and TrueCrypt has no built-in throttling. Ensure that the process priority is set to "Normal" and report back. – Breakthrough Jun 27 '11 at 17:58
@Break: 0-1%... – Andreas Bonini Jun 27 '11 at 18:15
@Break: I added a screenshot – Andreas Bonini Jun 27 '11 at 18:17
It looks like the bottleneck is somewhere else... What kind of drive is the partition on? How is that drive connected? (USB?) If you click the Resource Monitor button in your screenshot, what does it look like for disk usage? (Speed in MB/s, %total usage, etc.) – Darth Android Jun 27 '11 at 18:28
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@Darth: it's your typical internal 3.5 inches 7500 RPM hard disk, nothing special about it. It's connected with SATA. It's reading and writing at 17.2 MB/s.. Maybe then this is the max speed and it really takes 36 hours at max speed :( – Andreas Bonini Jun 27 '11 at 18:32
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1 Answer

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You can do nothing. TC "None" Wipe mode will rewrite every block of your hard drive to prevent recover data by reading exist blocks. 7200 RPM ususally has a data rate of 80MB/s,count on data moving, random fill, moving back, the rate is about 15MB/s, 75000s for 1.5TB, and the time is pretty right.

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