Cloning bare metal Win10 drive for unRAID VM with added encryption

[golli53]

I just set up unRAID for the first time and I'm trying to clone my old Win10 install to a unRAID VM. The Win10 currently sits on a 1TB SSD and I plan to clone the drive to a 1TB NVME drive as an NTFS-formatted unassigned disk, then pass it through to the VM for better performance. One added wrinkle is I'd also like to add encryption (currently not using any). I've thought about encrypting the drive using VeraCrypt within the guest machine before/after transferring to VM.

 

1) Is it easiest to use a standard disk clone tool to clone the Win10 install to the NVME then pass it thru to a newly created unRAID VM? Or are there any considerations I should take into account, given the drive contents will used by a VM instead of bare metal Win10?

2) Is there an alternative for encryption that might result in better performance e.g. using unRAID's native encryption outside of the VM - or is that not possible given I want to pass thru and must use NTFS?

3) If using VeraCrypt, is it better to encrypt on my old bare metal system before transferring or transfer then encrypt inside the VM?

 

Would greatly appreciate pointers on any/all of these.