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Our laptops and portable drives must be LUKS encrypted. LUKS doesn't really seem to cause much performance loss on normal laptop hard drives (7200RPM) for us. With the crazy data rates you get with SSDs, is that still true?

I searched around a little, but I didn't see any actual comparisons between LUKS vs. non-LUKS on SSDs.

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3 Answers 3

Yes the CPU usage of the encryption will go up, however unless the machine is otherwise CPU bound I'd expect IO to still be the bottlenect as most current machines should be able to exceed 250MB/sec of AES (that being the SATA-3g bandwidth)

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I'm currently seeing 150MB/s performance with my SSD and LUKS. That is a 50% loss since without LUKS my SSD will get 300MB/s read performance.

I'm using Fedora 17 with Linux kernel 3.4.

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AES-NI with SSD tests are in a link below check this: http://dentarg.it64.com/content/luks-and-intel-aes-ni-performance-part-2

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