January, 2015. For about a decade now, I've been using full disk encryption on FreeBSD. Many articles I've seen on the web giving directions on how to accomplish this are not really "full disk"; they leave some of your hard drive unencrypted because the boot code itself needs to be unencrypted. I, on the other hand, am unreasonably paranoid, and so have long had my boot code on an external thumb drive so that my entire hard drive is encrypted. After booting, the thumb drive can be removed and physically kept with you or in a trusted place.