Writing speed difference between truecrypt container and whole drive enryption

Question

I need to encrypt a 2 TB external HDD with Truecrypt. This will be used to collect some hundreds of GB on that drive. I will create either a container or encrypt the whole drive. From a security point of view both options are equally ok to me. Is one of the two better in regards to speed of writing on the encrypted drive?

To be exact the two options are called in truecrypt:

• Create an encrypted file container

vs

• Encrypt a non-system partition / drive

Answer 1

The common sense tell me the option with entire harddisk will be faster. The reason is very sample. If you create container this container will reside in the filesystem and therefore will have slower access time because of this intermediate layer. Also any fragmentation in disk filesystem will inpact the speed (not very much, but ...)

Of course this can be check very fast by creating two test partitions, create on first filesystem, create container, format it. Then encrypt second partition. Mount both of them and check the speed