>How to Defrag TrueCrypt
Defragmentation isn’t recommended by the TrueCrypt Organisation but it’s recommended by How2Defrag experts, we noticed a 38% increase in speed on a fully encrypted TrueCrypt protected laptop by using O&O Defrag Professional – If you use full drive encryption already you may be aware that encrypting your hard drive causes significant performance issues and can slow your system down to half the speed it would be if you had not encrypted it.
To get some of our performance back on our laptop we installed O&O Defrag Professional and ran a Quick Start setup to start immediate defragmentation of the system – once installed O&O Defrag will constantly ensure the system fragmentation levels are kept low as it runs in the background doing preventive maintenance for your system.
We benchmarked the laptop before and after – it was considerably faster by 38.4% after O&O Defrag was done improving the performance and speeding everything up this is a massive increase in performance and everything was noticeably faster, Windows would hang for about 8 minutes on start up but after running O&O the start up time was minutes shorter taking only 2 minutes (after log on screen) compared to the previous slow boot up times, software opened considerably faster especially things like web browsers and opening documents in software such as Microsoft Office was very responsive, this also solved issues such as Firefox crashing and hanging.
Will defrag ruin my TrueCrypt boot?
We’ve run O&O Defrag on many computers and laptops running full disk encryption and had zero problems with issues booting, infact using defrag will stop corruption of the hard drive meaning it won’t crash and lose data – if your drive drive was to crash and lose even a line of code on the truecrypt header then it wouldn’t boot ever again, using O&O Defrag to prevent this from happening is very wise as it prevents crashes and improves all round performance of your system.
This is defiantly the best way to run an encrypted drive – and with O&O its set and forget it will keep your computer optimized constantly over time without you having to worry keeping your computer fast and responsive without having to worry about manually running a defrag every few weeks.
O&O Defrag on Encrypted Containers: WARNING!
This is one thing you SHOULDN’T defrag – avoid defragging mounted containers of TrueCrypt? Why this can ruin your security as it will organize it physically on the disk when it should only stay in memory – just defrag the HOST machine not the file itself if you want to maintain your security and performance – this can damage your fragmentation as once you close the container the files are lost causing instant fragmentation on your hard drives so this is defiantly against the rules of defrag and computer optimization!
Avoid defragmentation of an encrypted container – but defrag on the system as a whole is A-Okay and recommended.