I've considered encrypting my sample HDDs many years ago to avoid prosecution should a smart law-savvy individual appear on the horizon to tell me how unlawful it is to install plugin on 3 PCs even though the licence allows me just one.
With the advent of AES-NI in 2009, encryption got way easier, however CPU spikes are unavoidable most of the time. When Kontakt loads anything from your RAID-0, you can expect 1GB/s speeds. Yes, today CPUs can decrypt as fast as 25GB/s, but it will inevitably cause a CPU spike which may translate to audible pop.
TrueCrypt seems to be best option so far, least intrusive and most reliable. Yes, it's credibility was questioned in May after the unexpected shutdown, but "Truecrypt must not die" website (truecrypt.ch) concluded that the most possible scenario is that the devs were forced by CIA to implement backdoor, and since they refused, they had to shutdown the project.

So back to my original question, does anyone use SW HDD encryption on their audio-related HDDs/SDDs? (FDE doesn't count, as it's proprietary any therefore most likely backdoored)

 

Nobody will raid your place because of some downloaded sample libraries or abuse of owned licences. Relax.

 

Yep, I realized that over the years
Still my question remains... *yes*

 

Honestly today it's tough to even know what encryption standards have been weakened due to the involvement of rogue agencies. I guess they think that they can get away with murder because they have for so long and and will likely continue to do so in the future. You can get yourself a self-encrypting hard drive where the encryption is handled by the controller but these are plagued with the same kinds of problems that external hard drives that perform hardware encryption have and that's data loss in the case the controller dies and therefore so does your decryption key. True Crypt is supposedly not secure anymore (at least on XP) so don't use that. *no*

You can use BitLocker if you're running Windows 7, it's built-in. Only In Ultimate And Enterprise though.

Highly recommend checking that list I put up of 41 Must-Read Internet Security Blogs because they talk about this kind of stuff and it will keep you in the know.

 

Catalyst,

"...that list I put up of 41 amazing security blogs you should be reading..."

The URL to that list, Please.

Thank you,

Rondtree

 

There's one rule when it comes to encryption: don't use anything developed in the USA - it's very likely to have a backdoor.
Bitlocker can be attacked via cold boot.
I once used safeguard easy, but that's with sophos now and in the uk, so it's likely to be compromised.

Jetico BestCrypt could be promising. It offers twofish 256 bit and the company is located in Finland.

I don't know where the OP is from, but here you have the priviledge to refuse to give evidence and plead the fifth, so to speak.

 

Link to security blogs added.

Cold boot attacks are not specific to BitLocker. Any program that would store the key in RAM would be vulnerable.

 

even hardware encryption on controllers can be hacked.
After all, it was proved after Snowden episod agencies can change code on the controllers themselves.

Who can you trust ? No one. That's the crude reality. Code being open-source is a good start. Closed code (like Bitlocker) can hide anything, from backdoor to simple weaknesses.

Read this :
Alternative TC
TC not dead :D

 

Sure open source is good but at this point I think it doesn't matter because as you said: you can't trust anything. The problem with open source is also that the developers are working on no budget so there is not as much incentive. That doesn't necessarily mean anything because I don't make money but yet provide a better experience than on forums that generate income however sometimes money can be necessary to get past hurdles that you are bound to encounter when facing off against the advanced capability of the military industrial complex. Supposedly they don't have quantum computing yet but when they do it will be impossible to stop them.