neos6464

Interesting finding. I've never thought to benchmark random access because, FWIW, I've never noticed any apparent performace decrease with just normal PC usage.

This should be added to the VC help file

There must be something wrong with your setup. I get absolutely no performance hit on a SATA SSD with sequential r/w speeds of ~400MB/s, and sequential r/w speeds of ~700MB/s on a platter drive RAID (the bottleneck being the max speed of this RAID). This is using the AES cipher, with hardware accleration, on a 2012-ish PC. Maybe try retrimming your SSD. Make one large file with fsutil file createnew and fsutil file setvaliddata to fill all of the free space, and then delete it.

There must be something wrong with your setup. I get absolutely no performance hit on a SATA SSD with sequential r/w speeds of ~400MB/s, and sequential r/w speeds of ~700MB/s on a platter drive RAID (the bottleneck being the max speed of this RAID). This is using the AES cipher, with hardware accleration, on a 2012-ish PC.

For advanced users, it should still be possible to use ReFS with VeraCrypt by using software which emulates an actual physical disk such as Arsenal Image Mounter (see here https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/features/thread/9cc3fd9e67/) Too bad the way AIM is licensed now, I doubt it can be easily integrated into any VC workflow for anyone other than end users.

Fastest way is to use the linux dd command. Like so: dd bs=512 count=1 if=<input file> of=<output file>. There's a Windows implementation here: http://www.chrysocome.net/dd Be very careful using dd, it is a powerful tool that makes it very easy to accidentally overwrite and destroy data!

Look here: https://superuser.com/a/980804

A quick and dirty way to make a header backup of a non-system disk/partition or file-hosted container is to just make a copy of its first 512 bytes (0x10200 for a hidden conatiner). Note that this breaks one of the security principles of VeraCrypt - it provides proof for an attacker that your disk/partition/file-hosted container contains encrypted data, so avoid doing this if this scenario is important to you.