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

[Peter Gutmann]

Alexander Klimov <alserkli at inbox.ru> writes:

>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.

I agree that in most cases the access-time argument is a red herring.  Back
when I wrote SFS (DOS-based FDE that ran on 386's), I got plenty of feedback
from users that the slowdown was barely or not at all noticeable.  The only
time I've really noticed it (using current FDE software, not on a 25 MHz 386)
is when copying large amounts of data onto an encrypted partition, but that's
(a) a very rare event and (b) somewhat slow anyway even for an unencrypted
copy.

Peter.

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