Originally Posted by
Dubai Stu
I am thinking about full drive encryption on a cheap micro notebook (the 10 inch EEPC w/ Windows) that I bought for a trip to Africa and to use whiile Sony reinvents its recalled TZ line. (Hopefully with affordable gen 2x solid state drives).
My question is whether such encryption will take much oompph out of my already undercharged processor. Don't get me wrong, the machine peppy enough right now, but I am afraid that this will be the equivalent of hitching an oversized trailer to a moderately powered six cylinder.
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Inititally encrypting the whole disk will likely cause a substantial performance hit, but that's true of any PC. Personally, when I add disk encryption to a new notebook, I plan on not even trying to use it while the disk is being encrypted initially, which can mean leaving it alone for an hour to as long as overnight. Trying to encrypt the disk in the "background" is just too painful.
Once it's encrypted, though, I doubt you'll see too much impact in day to day use. Assuming you're doing typical web browsing, word processing, and the like, your PC is almost never CPU-bound. Perfomance limiters are generally network I/ and disk I/O, and while disk reads will be slower with decryption required you're talking about 10-20-30%, not orders of magnitude slower.
You should also check out
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tom_disk&num=1 , which is right up your alley. I have no idea how good a source Phoronix is, but the article looks legit.
Bob