I’ve put a brand new SSD into my work computer and my IT department wants me to use BitLocker. I read one of the other threads on BitLocker performance on standard harddrives, but I was wondering – what’s the performance impact of BitLocker like on a Solid State Drive?
Will it noticeably impact the speed with which I open my archive files in Outlook or open projects in Visual Studio?
Solution:
You should have a negligible performance impact with most SSDs. Especially with the latest Intel CPUs that can do hardware AES way faster than a drive (any drive) can read or write. My MacBook Pro pushes over 900 megabytes per second with AES according to the TrueCrypt benchmark, and that’s a laptop.
On my desktop I use 4 Samsung SSDs in RAID0 and I have BitLocker turned on. TrueCrypt on this same machine reports over 5GB/sec for AES. (Two 6-core Xeons…)
That said, the SandForce SSD controller is said to do some internal compression/dedupe (which was proven via benchmarks that used large compressed files that it could not “optimize”). Obviously this is not going to work at all with BitLocker where every encrypted sector will be completely unique and uncompressible. So if you’re planning on using an SSD, don’t get a SandForce one – or if you do, make sure you can return it if you find that performance really degrades after you turn BitLocker on.