If you want to increase the security of your data, you can use their encryption. This is offered by many different ones today SSD on a hardware basis, but it is also possible to use a software variant in the operating system. While Home versions of Windows do not offer this, Pro variants already do. But with Windows 11 Pro, the function can activate itself without the user’s knowledge, and the user can suffer from reduced SSD performance due to its encryption without knowing it. On the server Tomshardware.com looked at this very issue and came to interesting results. They used a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB SSD, which they tested without encryption, with OPAL HW encryption and BitLocker software encryption from Windows 11 Pro.
In principle, the results can be summarized in the conclusion that while sequential transmissions and accesses did not suffer much, this was no longer true for random ones, where there were also significant fluctuations. E.g. in PCMark 10, the HW encrypted version had the highest throughput of 620 MB/s, beating even the unencrypted version with 607 MB/s. However, SW encryption yielded only 490 MB/s, which is roughly a 20% drop in performance. Similarly, the total score also ended with a 20% drop, and on the contrary, latencies even increased by more than 20% (from 42-43 µs to 53 µs).
CrystalDiskMark showed roughly 20% lower performance for random reads, but even about 45% lower performance for random writes. And while the transmissions were almost half, the latencies were almost double. However, SW encryption was even the fastest for sequential reading and writing. The last was DiskBench, which showed a reduced copy speed of 1435 MB/s against about 1620-1650 MB/s. You can see more accurate results and other graphs on the source server.
2023-10-23 21:41:14
#impact #BitLocker #encryption #Windows #Pro #performance
