Romex Software Forum

I have drives that are fully encrypted. However they don't show up in the cache manager as disks or volumes.
No matter if mounted or not.

From what I understand Promicache works on physical disk level so it should be able to read and cache the encrypted bytes.

So I wonder why it does not. I am using Drivecrypt but is it supposed to work with Truecrypt fde which is basicalle similar technique?

We haven't supported encrypted volumes yet. We'll support it as soon as possible. Thank you!

I think this because the drives mounted by Derivecrypt are not acts as real disks. Do they show up in Windows disk manager?

It does not show as Volume but the drive itself is present.
I really think you should find ways to make sure that the cache can be used with encrypted data. It should not be necessaty do encrypt and under no circumstances decrypted data should reside stored in L2 cache.

As PrimoCache works on the volume level, not on the disk level, if it does not show as a Volume, I'm sorry that PrimoCache cannot work for it.

support wrote:As PrimoCache works on the volume level, not on the disk level, if it does not show as a Volume, I'm sorry that PrimoCache cannot work for it.

Wasn't that exactly what FancyCache Disk was doing? Why was that feature removed? There is much need for that.

You're right. FancyCache Disk edition is able to do it. But for some reasons, only the FancyCache volume edition was migrated to PrimoCache. I'm not sure if the features of the FancyCache Disk will be added or not in future.

support wrote:You're right. FancyCache Disk edition is able to do it. But for some reasons, only the FancyCache volume edition was migrated to PrimoCache. I'm not sure if the features of the FancyCache Disk will be added or not in future.

It definitely should. It is such an important feature.

Just to give some feedback here - I tried disk encryption a few years ago, and almost lost a set of volumes because of it. It makes actually fixing drive/volume issues when they happen a nightmare, and because of this I never recommend encrypting an entire disk. All of the tools we used to have to repair problems become utterly useless. Now I recommend that my clients use file/folder encryption, or at most volume encryption at the OS level.

I think the importance people place on encrypting volumes is overstated. And if you are doing so, you should probably just accept that there's always a performance hit when doing so.

I always assumed that Primocache had features that rely on the volume as the primary object, instead of the drive, which precludes it working with drive-level encryption. Changing it back to the way FancyCache used to work might be far more trouble than it is worth, and perhaps even impossible, if I understand it right.

There may be an opportunity here for some type of encryption to be built in to Primocache, so there isn't a need for cross-compatibility.

@Jaga: I wouldn't mind caching on volume level if it would be working. At this time Primocache does not recognize the mounted volume in my case so it is not caching at all.
Second issue is indeed a security problem if encrypted data gets saved in L2 cache decrypted. That completely defeats the purpose of on the fly encryption.

This is also the reason why I believe it would not be a good idea to built encryption into Primocache. It could not be trusted and would interfere with the primary enryption that has set up in a specific way to secure the data.

I believe Primocache should simply not care wether data is encrypted or not. It should simply move around bits and bytes no matter what they mean.