Hi everyone,

I was thinking about using BitLocker on my Windows machine to protect all my files. I am not sure, however, how it will affect my computer's overall performance. I've read somewhere that loading times from HDD are indeed higher but that it also depends a lot on the CPU and in some cases there may be almost no difference.

Is it true? I'm sure someone here has been working or at least seen this technology in use. I would really appreciate your opinions and some actual data if possible.

Hi Vodahmin,

I was looking for information on this as well last year. There are a lot of threads that deal with this (on other forums).
I really wanted to use BitLocker without TPM hardware and headed out to fix that in system settings. It didn't work for some reason, it still asked for my TPM - so I tried TrueCrypt instead which claimed to be about as good, just a little bit slower (at least the tests said so..).

After trying TrueCrypt, I found no visible difference. Did some benchmarks and sure, it was slightly slower, as expected, than unencrypted stuff. I then enabled AES-NI on my motherboard but now my tests showed an increase in performance. I thought my tests were trash - I mean, it's not logical that encrypting something is faster than doing nothing with it. Turns out that the driver they supply do some pipelining of its own that it's slightly faster than the one in Windows, sometimes considerably faster.

I've been using system encryption since then and am very very pleased. I don't think it matters whether you chose BitLocker or TrueCrypt - both are probably equally as good. I just found TrueCrypt less of a hassle to setup, and that's not my usual experience with open source projects. Again, I'm very very pleased!

(There's an episode over at Security Now GSC where they also tests TrueCrypt - and come to the same performance conclusions. And if you do listen to that episode, remember that the swap and hibernate files are now encrypted too..)

Have fun, and don't be afraid to try full system encryption - if you don't like it you can just disable it again!

Thank you for the valuable answer. I think I will give it a try, at least with my USB removable drives.

Thank you for the valuable answer. I think I will give it a try, at least with my USB removable drives.

Just don't forget to enable AES-NI if your hardware supports it. The difference is huge.