I don't see why you couldn't encrypt the entirety of the pool. However, I have two concerns.

The first being the degrading of sytem performance. My employer runs full drive encryption on our laptops. This really drags the machine into the ground and significantly increases boot times.

My second concern involves how effective the encryption would be. By encrypting the whole pool, you would protect your data if anyone were to get their hands on your physical drives. However, If someone manages to defeat security and log into the server either from the web or internally on your network, the system woiuld decrypt the data at the time of access. So what have you really bought yourself other than a fun new project and some bragging rights? Basically, the encryption only protects you against the physical theft of your WHS and removal of your drives.

-Martin

EX475 + 5TB, 2 GB mem, LE-1640, External DVD (USB)
PC's: Vista64 Biz, Vista Ultimate (32)
Laptops: Vista Home Premium (32), XP Home SP3
Network: DLink DIR-855

I too am interested in using Truecrypt to encrypt the entire pool. I have several 3 year old laptops upon which I've installed Truecrypt and enabled full disk encryption. I see absolutely no slow down on writes or reads. And I've read posts from knowledgeable people that have done speed test before and after enabling full disk encryption that confirm that experience.

JohnBick's idea of using Truecrypt's optional keyfile is a good idea as it adds two-factor authentication to the mix.

I'd like to hear an update from JohnBick as to his experience enabling full disk encryption of his entire pool.

Fred

If the only restriction of using Truecrypt is when you add/replace a hard drive, I could live with that as that is something I don't plan on doing too often.  I guess the work around in that situation is to decrypt the entire collection of drives, add/replace a hard drive, and then re-encrypt all hard drives again.

Another scenario to consider is what happens when your all your disks are encrypted and then a  hard drive fails hard? Does that prevent one from using the other hard drives?

I logged into TrueCrypt's forums and searched "windows home server" and got a page full of postings dealing with TrueCrypt and WHS.  Seems like several people are have varied success with backing up TrueCrypted clients as well as encrypting the WHS server itself.  But no definitive success stories.

Fred

I don't know if you know about it or not, but Windows clients (Professional/Business and above editions) have the option to encrypt drives using Windows EFS (encrypting file system). It's built into the OS, so it's at the OS level like you need. It's basically password/passkey encryption and is easy to use, especially on removable storage like flash-drives. However, it may not be up to your standards of protection. But hey, it's an option. I don't know if WHS has EFS or not. I think it was introduced in Vista, but it may have been in XP after a service pack or something.