I think the TC documentation is a little confusing if not confused when it comes to the discussion of TRIM and hibernation/shutting down. I did not understand the TRIM discussion to mean that it's only an issue for plausible deniability, but I could be wrong.
And I thought the issue with shutting down/hibernation is not that of a cold attack at all but that bits of RAM could end up in the pagefile and/or the hibernation file. But then again it could be that the documentation is poorly worded. As I understand it Windows 8 uses the hibernation file almost exclusively to shut down.
I think it's pretty clear, but it does require careful reading. Maybe more than once. No idea how Windows 8 is using the hibernation file. As you are using an SSD, something I wrote the other day bears repeating:
I always recommend disabling hybrid sleep on SSDs unless you really need it, and if you're on a laptop, you don't thanks to the battery, and on a desktop equipped with a decent UPS like my APC XS-1500 running Powerchute, you don't, because the UPS will wake it from regular sleep to hibernate in the event of a prolonged power outage. This saves me 10s of GBs of completely pointless writes per day.
You really don't want to be frequently hibernating to an SSD due to lifespan issues, and hybrid sleep writes a hibernation file.
Another perceived advantage of using Bitlocker is that you're not putting all your eggs in one basket. Bitlocker for the system drive, which has nothing of value (in plain text) on it except the page file, and a small TC container on that system drive.
If the pagefile isn't encrypted, you're potentially leaking data. I don't understand the rest of the comment. I think the real advantage to Bitlocker is that it should work with all the Microsoft technologies like dynamic disks and the new storage spaces. It might even be possible to dual boot with it. Truecrypt forced me to give up on multi-booting and disk imaging and thus my Terabyte products, but for the multi-booting, anyway, it really kind of did me a favor, as I now consider it more trouble than it was worth. For my purposes, VMs make up for it.
As for the hibernation file, I would quickly get rid of that in Windows 8. My computer starts up quickly enough without any help.
I keep it around for the power loss issue mentioned above, but I never hibernate manually. Only my UPS will ever do it, and so far, it's done it once.
I don't know how many computers have TPM. My computer at work has it, and it's not a special computer. If the computer doesn't have it, you can use a USB drive instead with Bitlocker I think. A pin with only digits is pretty unbelievably silly though.
The USB drive always seemed very stupid to me. One can't just leave it attached all the time, and what do I do with it after I boot? Hide it? Then when I reboot, I have to go retrieve it from its hidey-hole? No thanks. I'll just keep using Truecrypt and typing my passphrase. This is actually what made me go with Truecrypt when I was looking at it and Bitlocker a couple of years ago when I got my SSD and decided to encrypt
everything, which is the only way to avoid data leakage.
I am going to use TC on my old laptop to see what it's like. It has a very slow hard drive, so it might be unbearable with encryption, but I will check it out.
You won't notice any speed degradation unless your CPU is very slow, and if your hard drive is very slow, well, that means your CPU will have to be that much slower. If you don't have a newer CPU with the AES instructions, multiple cores can help a lot. Deciding to use Truecrypt makes me glad I bought an i5 750 with 4 cores back in 2009 when I built my current computer.