Encrypt entire external USB HDD

[seemax1991]

Hi,

• I know that VC can encrypt external drives (did this before)
• I know that I can only use them on devices with VC installed
• I want to buy this drive: Western Digital My Book 6TB

question:
- Am I able to encrypt a 6TB drive with VC?

thanks in advance
user

[Enigma2Illusion]

Hello,

You will need to have the Bytes per Sector = 512 since VeraCrypt cannot handle larger sizes.

In the command window, enter the command below replacing K with your drive letter to see the size.
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo K:

Therefore, you will have to purchase the drive to determine what size WD is using for Bytes per Sector. You may be able to find the answer by posting on WD sites/forums for the specific model of HDD.

Kind Regards.

[seemax1991]

Hello,
it seems that all of WDs My Book series external one-drive storage devices are AF (Advanced Format) drives.
These drives run with 4k 512e (512byte emulation). This feature can be activated using the formatter.exe provided by western digital.

I guess 512e works with VC?
http://veracrypt2.rssing.com/chan-19067982/all_p52.html

regards,
user

[mvilimpoc]

When using VeraCrypt with a similar Advanced Format (512e) type drive, I experienced frequent transfer rate stalling and stuttering. It's not something I intend to use going forward. TrueCrypt had identical issues.

More notes at this thread:
https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/technical/thread/ab035219/#de07

[Testoslav]

I have WD green (internal), which uses AF too (4k sector size). I use it with truecrypt, but I gave it hell with torrents (it's my seedbox & file server) and never cared about AF or sector size, mentioned formatter.exe, or whatever, because I did not know it could be problem. It is up 24/7, now has over 11000 hours of uptime, had many power outages, and it works perfectly and is reliable. I simply bought a drive, made partitions using windows, formatted with TC and all just worked. I'm on 100mbit fibre and Its performance is decent, it only chokes when adding multiple large torrents. Maybe I have been lucky, but it works. I'm restarting windows once or twice a month, when they behave erratic, otherwise no problems at all. Don't worry, everything is probably backwards compatible ;-)

edit: there's discussion about problems at https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/discussions/577701, it seems that as long as you use partitions, it works fine, but without partitions you will have problems.