I thought about encrypting my hard disks, or at least part of them that contain personal data, for at least one year. I never did it because I thought it would be a lot of work involved. I had to find a good program, one that would offer good encryption algorithms, would be powerful and easy to use.

It should be able to encrypt complete partitions, offer real-time-encryption and hidden partitions. Today, I finally decided to give this a try. I bought a external hard drive, installed the program GiliSoft USB Stick Encryption and used it to encrypt the complete external drive.

It took about one minitue time to format and encrypt the drive which is connect to my pc using usb 2.0. I then moved all files and programs to the encrypted drive which showed up as just another hard drive. One great feature is that I can run programs from the encrypted hard drive, it should not be a problem to run bittorrent, emule, ftp, browsers aso from the encrypted drive. As of now, I did not encounter errors or slow downs.

Another great feature is that GiliSoft USB Stick Encryption’s secure area is a hidden partition inside the encrypted drive. If someone forces you to reveal the content of the drive the hidden partition remains untouched. And no one is able to find out that easily that there is a hidden area inside the revealed area.

GiliSoft USB Stick Encryption comes with a step by step guide. Its really easy to setup and run.Let me know if you try it out and write about your experience using the software.