@lembas: I disagree !
A hidden encrypted container will not help in any scenario. Those with a
serious interest in your data would torture you so long until you tell them
that there is a hidden container. Those who steal your notebook or want to
copy your data will make a full clone of your drive anyhow and most likely
will be able to find out about hidden partitions since nothing can really be
"hidden" if you need to retrive / open the container to work with it.
Persons who travel to the US for example should not port a notebook with date
anyhow. They are best of with a clean HDD without any data / OS on it (dd
if=/dev/zero of=/dev/your-drive). After they arrive they should access their
data stored on an external server via secure connection and download their
stuff. A live GNU/Linux distribution plus access to your data via sshfs or
sftpfs will most likely work pretty transparent since your can use FUSE to
access your remote data like a local drive.
IMO the same goes for people which sensitive data. No sensitive data should
be stored on your local drives in case of a house search. Today it is pretty
easy to store data at some server you can trust (e.g. running owncloud on a
remote server outside your country / running an sftp server which keeps your
tomb file).
