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I have USB storage device and I want to create a realcrypt container directly in the device. I don't want to have to create it in the system first and then transfer the container to my USB device. I am planning on creating a 250GB container, which will take long time to transfer into USB device.

Can you do that? If so, how is it done?

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  • First part of your question asks if realcrypt can be created directly on an external drive and the second half asks how long will it take to transfer it to external drive. Which of the two do you want to know ?
    – Shekhar
    Nov 22, 2013 at 21:08
  • @Shakehar, no that was a statement not a question. Sorry for the confusion.
    – user270603
    Nov 22, 2013 at 21:15

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Yes, you can create a container directly on a USB storage device. From the OS's point of view a USB device is just another block device and can be treated the same way as a hard drive.

The speed of creating a container will depend on a number of things - assuming you want to use the full 250 gigs, it will take a very long time, both because of doing the encryption [ this will depend somewhat on the type of processor and speed of it - probably faster if realcrypt can take advantage of AES instructions and your processor supports it ], but I'd imagine the biggest overhead will be writing to a 250 gig external drive. You are looking at hours or possibly days to fill it - depending on the drive and connection speed. I imagine this would still be faster then creating a container and copying it across - particularly if its the full size.

Its also not clear what you mean by "using the block device directly". While you could put it on the raw block device, you may be better of making a partitition (using fdisk or similar) and using that. In that way it will be accessible from other OS's.

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  • When I say directly, I mean issuing a say command on the terminal to create the containter file on the usb device not first created it in your system and then transfer that container into your usb device. do you know what I mean?
    – user270603
    Nov 22, 2013 at 21:29
  • I have been creating RealCrypt container in my system and then transferring it my usb device. The reason I am asking this question is because obviously it will take as long as creating the container file to transfer the file into USB.
    – user270603
    Nov 22, 2013 at 21:35
  • I confess to never having used realcrypt, however I have compiled and used truecrypt (which I understand is essentially the same thing) directly on USB partitions directly and it works perfectly.
    – davidgo
    Nov 22, 2013 at 22:39

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