Can you keep a secret? This encrypted drive can...

[Alexander Klimov]

On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Saqib Ali wrote:
> Well for one thing, any software based FDE is extremely slow, doubles
> the file access times, and is a serious drain on the laptop battery.

If a PC is used by an interactive user, it is irrelevant how much
access time is increased, as far as the user cannot see a difference
without a timer. Several times I have read that disk encryption is not
noticeable. My own experience shows that I cannot notice any
difference: emacs and pine respond immediately to every key-press if I
use encrypted disk or not; firefox waits for data from network the
same amount of time; mplayer does not drop frames with or without disk
encryption; compilation of kernel takes some noticeable time with or
without encryption, but I don't know how much exactly since I spend
this time in some other program.

I don't want to say that the difference is irrelevant for all uses,
e.g., if one edits video with 2k resolution or hosts a busy database,
they can see very real difference, but such use-cases are minority and
they are not done on portable computers anyway.

I guess many people here have tried full disk encryption for
themselves, do you notice any difference in performance or not?

-- 
Regards,
ASK

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