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On my Win 10 20H2 workstation I'd like to encrypt drive D: - a big 4 TB RAID data volume.

The volume is made from 4 x 1 TB Samsung NVMe drives mounted on a Dell Ultraspeed PCIe card. Unencrypted file I/O throughput exceeds 10 GB/second. Note that D: is not the boot volume; that's another, separate NVMe drive.

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Thing is, I'd like to keep most of the performance AND add encryption.

Bitlocker refuses to work in the direct sense - when DISKMGMT.MSC is used to create the 4 TB volume as a striped array as shown above, with each disk listed separately as a Dynamic volume, Bitlocker simply does not offer the composite drive up for encryption. I had really hoped that I'd be able to turn on Bitlocker and it would just enable the hardware encryption in each individual NVMe drive. But it is not possible it seems.

BitLocker

Any ideas what I can do here to enable hardware encryption? Could perhaps Intel RST be used to make the RAID array out of the four NVMe drives? That might enable even better real-world performance in that RAM caching is done at a lower level. This system has gobs of RAM.

I have the data backed up so I can experiment, though it will take part of a day to get the data to/from the backup drive.

Looking for ideas...

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge!

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  • While I haven't used RST and generally not a fan of that kind of "fake RAID", it still does sound like a better option than the legacy Windows 2000 "Dynamic Disks" feature that even Microsoft tells you to not use anymore...
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Feb 14, 2021 at 10:21
  • whatever solution you will use, it will always have a drop in performance...just depends if the drop will be within your acceptance range.
    – Zina
    Commented Feb 14, 2021 at 13:22
  • I have heard others over time claim they do not like "fake RAID" setups, but I've used RAID, both software (as above), RST, and other solutions that involved hardware controllers, and frankly none have been problematic from a reliability perspective. So far my only limitation has been this lack of combinable features that I have described above. I don't think a lot of folks have experience in this area, though. Since posting the above, I have heard of a separately licensable solution from Intel for this specific hardware I have that may give me what I need here.
    – NoelC
    Commented Feb 15, 2021 at 13:32

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