Good people,
I don't have any experience with encryption of drives, even after 15 years of programming! Shame on me, but I've had no need of it.
Does anyone here have any experience with it, and if so, which software do you prefer?
Are there any hardware considerations, and lastly, is it enough to encrypt a small portion?
I'm going to be encrypting my code, so it's not very big. (a few hundred MB of data)

See: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/government-watchdog-warrantless-laptop-searches-at-border-are-a-ok

Which made me think of what I have that is valuable - my code. I'm not necessarily worried about governments, of course. It's a matter of principle. I'm the guy that reads the manuals, and the warnings! Readme writers love me!

Thank you

EDIT: Currently having a look at TrueCrypt ( http://www.truecrypt.org/ )

There was a topic about this a month or so ago..

With TrueCrypt you can encrypt the whole drive or portions of it, sure. I really only wanted to encrypt my source code too, like yourself.. and was a little bit worried I'd kill performance if I encrypted the whole drive. But I use hibernate a lot and learned that source code would also be readable in the hibernation file if I didn't encrypt it and someone got hold of my laptop, so had to use full-system encryption anyway.

Been running that for a year now, and not looking back. Just make sure you got AES-NI instruction support and you're golden! I actually got a small boost in performance over running no encryption. Look up the other thread if you're interested in why.