It matters when you copy huge files, which is not something that you do very often. However read bandwidth is not that important. The X25-M G2 is announced at 250 MB/s read bandwidth (that's what the specs say), so, in "ideal" conditions, BitLocker necessarily involves a bit of a slowdown. The two cores could process about 220 MB/s, assuming perfect data transfer and core synchronization with no overhead, and that nothing requires the CPU in the same time (that one hell of an assumption, actually). On a Core2 machine, clocked at 2.53 GHz, encryption speed should be about 110 MB/s, using one core. I am talking here from a theoretical point of view I have not tried BitLocker.īitLocker uses AES encryption with a 128-bit key. Therefore I use TrueCrypt for removable media. Bitlocker-to-go (new on Windows 7) for USB devices on the other hand is simply too annoying to work with, since you cannot easily exchange information with non-W7 machines. To back this up with more non-scientifical "proof": many of my co-workers used their machines intensively without BitLocker before I joined the company (it became mandatory to use it around the time I joined, even though I am pretty sure the two events are totally unrelated), and they have not experienced noticable performance degradation either.įor me personally, having an "always on" solution like BitLocker beats manual steps for encryption, hands-down. Building large projects might take a bit longer, but not enough to notice. Although I have not used this particular machine without BitLocker enabled, it really does not feel sluggish at all when compared to my desktop machine (dual core, 16 GB, dual Raptor disks, no BitLocker). Having used a laptop with BitLocker enabled for almost 2 years now with more or less similar specs (although without the SSD unfortunately), I can say that it really isn't that bad, or even noticable. It took less than an hour to toggle Bitlocker on/off so maybe you could just turn it on when you are traveling then disable it afterwards. Personally I'm keeping Bitlocker enabled despite the performance hit because I travel often. In my case the processor has no hardware AES so compilation is worst case scenario, needing cycles for both assembly and crypto.Ī newer system with Sandy Bridge would probably make better use of a Bitlocker enabled SDD in a development environment. I guess it all depends on the combination of processor, ram, and ssd vs hdd. These are ballpark because I'm looking at my watch hand. Larger build took 2 seconds vs 5 from before. In real life usage however boot time is about the same, cold launch of Opera 11.5 with 79 tabs remained the same 4 seconds all tabs loaded from cache.Ī small build in VS2010 took 2 seconds in both situations. Random write, and the 4KB speeds are almost identical.Ĭlearly the processor is the bottleneck in this case. With my T7300 2.0GHz and Kingston V100 64gb SSD the results are I think on modern hardware with a good SSD, you won't notice!Ģ021 Update: I have been enabling bitlocker on all my computers and it flies now. It feels pretty much like my desktop, which is an i7-2600k 4.6 GHz. If I hear some bad stories about BitLocker, I'll keep doing what I am doing now, which is keeping stuff RAR'ed with a password when I am not actively working on it, and then SDeleting it when I am done (but it's such a pain).Ģ015 Update: I've been using Visual Studio 2015 on my Surface Pro 3 when I travel, which has BitLocker enabled by default. It's pretty snappy but I want it to stay that way. My laptop is a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM and an Intel X25-M G2 SSD. How has the performance been? Is it noticeable? If so, is it bad? So I was curious if there are other developers out there who develop with BitLocker enabled. More than the usual office worker, I would think. Developers who use IDEs like Visual Studio are working on lots and lots of files at once. I am thinking of enabling BitLocker on my laptop to protect the contents, but I am concerned about performance degradation.
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