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I have a netbook that uses an SSD (Corsair Force 3 SSD (5.02)). When installing Ubuntu on it I chose an encrypted file system with EXT4. My question is: Does the file system suffer any performance penalties by using encryption?

Original Russian Translation

I have a netbook that uses an SSD На нетбук вместо обычного механического диска поставил твёрдотельный (Corsair Force 3 SSD (5.02)). When installing Устанавливая новую систему (Ubuntu on it I chose an encrypted file system with EXT412. My question is:10) Does the file system suffer any performance penalties by using encryption?выбрал шифрованную файловую систем EXT4. Вопрос: производительность файловой системы страдает от шифрования? мои диски

Rafał Cieślak
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Sergey Kozlov
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    Please keep your posts in English, as this is the only language accepted on Ask Ubuntu. Thanks! :-) – Andrea Corbellini Jan 05 '13 at 17:46
  • Привет @SergeyKzlov я перевел свой ​​вопрос и создал ответ для вас. Надеюсь, что это помогает другу. – Luis Alvarado Jan 05 '13 at 17:47
  • Please do not remove the russian part, since it is obvious the user is trying to get an answer here while trying hard to understand english. The least we can do is at least leave the original part in his language. – Luis Alvarado Jan 05 '13 at 17:50

1 Answers1

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Well in the past, encrypting the system would have a strong performance hit since all the I/O and processing that needed to be done between encryption and reading/writing to the disk. But since a couple of versions ago, the performance hit is less than 5%. I would even be so bold as to say it is less than 1% since, with some tested I did, the video performance, copy/paste, hdd benchmark and speed of boot were almost the same.

And since you are using Ubuntu 12.10, there is even less of a performance penalty.

Here is a link of the Performance on Ubuntu 11.10 with and without Encryption

And here is a very old benchmark on how it looked on 9.10

As you can see the performance has gone up since 11.10 and you are using 12.10, so the performance is basically the same. I was actually amazed n how it was running when I first tested this on 12.04.

don.joey
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Luis Alvarado
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  • I had to approve the removal of the translation but there are users that do not even know about google translate or any translate service. I see it a lot in spanish or french. Having the russian part did not actually create a problem, just simplify the answer to other russian users. Anyway, the community is the one that decides at the end. – Luis Alvarado Jan 05 '13 at 18:05
  • @Flimm - http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7538939#7538939 – Luis Alvarado Jan 05 '13 at 21:08
  • The 9.10 testing was done on a netbook; and the painful performance hit shown probably should be laid on the atom CPU because a prior test ran with 9.04 on a Phenom 9500 had a much lower level of performance degradation. Beginning with the Core i# series processors Intel added hardware AES support directly to the CPU; AMD did the same starting with BullDozer. I suspect CPU power has more to do with the speedup than enhancements in the OS itself; and that current atom based systems would still be hobbled badly. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_jaunty_encrypt&num=1 – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Jan 05 '13 at 21:23
  • @DanNeely good call buddy. – Luis Alvarado Jan 05 '13 at 21:37