I bet if you add the additional time it takes to boot a 5400rpm drive vs. a 7200rpm, you're not going to care about security, you'll want to throw it out the window... Use TrueCrypt, it's free and works well with portable USB drives. keep the OS on the system and all the sensitive data on an external drive.
Isn't that practically impossible. Sure, you could put your sensitive documents on an external drive and have it encrypted but login data and passwords still stay along with the OS on the notebook's drive. Plus, its easier to steal/lose a portable hard drive than a laptop. And hardly anyone lugs around two bags for their notebook and external drive. They will most likely put them in the same laptop bag.
Granted, it's not a whole disk encryption, but you can still encrypt the entire data partition (not the OS). As for lugging around stuff, I have a 16GB USB flash drive which hangs from my keys. It contains all my data, so that if my laptop is stolen, all they'll find is my Engadget browsing logs and some temp files. All the Office files I use stay on the flash drive. If you store your passwords on IE or Firefox, it's your fault :-)
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
I bet if you add the additional time it takes to boot a 5400rpm drive vs. a 7200rpm, you're not going to care about security, you'll want to throw it out the window... Use TrueCrypt, it's free and works well with portable USB drives. keep the OS on the system and all the sensitive data on an external drive.
Isn't that practically impossible. Sure, you could put your sensitive documents on an external drive and have it encrypted but login data and passwords still stay along with the OS on the notebook's drive. Plus, its easier to steal/lose a portable hard drive than a laptop. And hardly anyone lugs around two bags for their notebook and external drive. They will most likely put them in the same laptop bag.
As awesome as Truecrypt is, its still not whole disk encryption. Its great for storing certain files, or snail mailing your databases.
But with the nature of windows, any file/document on the encrypted drive that is accessed might be cached on the unencrypted part of the drive.
Granted, it's not a whole disk encryption, but you can still encrypt the entire data partition (not the OS). As for lugging around stuff, I have a 16GB USB flash drive which hangs from my keys. It contains all my data, so that if my laptop is stolen, all they'll find is my Engadget browsing logs and some temp files. All the Office files I use stay on the flash drive. If you store your passwords on IE or Firefox, it's your fault :-)