Does bitlocker encryption defeat the performance boost of an optane ssd?

[tesseramous]

I have a 480gb optane ssd (905p) I'm using as the OS boot drive in my gaming/workstation machine. I chose an optane drive because it had the fastest random memory access times, close to dram. Over time I have accumulated a lot of sensitive information all over the drive, so I am thinking of enabling bitlocker encryption. However, I have performance concerns. If I enable the bitlocker encryption, will it lower that fast retrieval time down the retrieval time of a regular ssd or worse and make it pointless that I ever bought an optane drive?

[Kilrah]

Nothing that matters. BL is handled in hardware and has massive and unnoticeable throughput.

[Strider1974]

If you are concerned why not create a secure folder or better yet get a second drive for your secure docs. This way you get the performance and security.

 

But to answer your question you will see a performance hit in I/O but this will be the case with any encrypted drive and I would expect when comparing two drives with and without bitlocker that the performance difference would remain mostly the same

[tesseramous]

I dont just have one easily identifiable set of secure documents. I now have things scattered all over the drive (or maybe its just my user profile) and am concerned about things like temp files, the browser profile, stored passwords, financial programs, etc. Bitlocker would be a way to baby proof everything and not have to constantly worry about specifics. But I would feel bad if I bought a drive for a 1ns retrieval time and now it is a 100ns retrieval time. I'm not asking about large sequential throughputs.

[porina]

I've never used BitLocker, but can you create a protected folder just for testing? You can run something like CrystalDiskMark in a specific folder. Do it on both unprotected and protected locations and compare results.

 

BTW I found CPU to be a bottleneck when I was testing my Optane 900p. Measurably better single thread random read results when CPU was overclocked to 5 GHz compared to 4 GHz, although I don't recall the details now.

[Kilrah]

No, the point of bitlocker is whole drive encryption.

 

But he can enable it, see if it works for him and disable it if it doesn't...

[Monstieur]

I have a 10900X at 5 GHz with an Optane 900P 280 GB. Software BitLocker reduces 4K Q1T1 read & write down from 300 MiB/s & 275 MiB/s to 100 MiB/s & 80 MiB/s. 4K Q32T16 write is reduced from 2200 MiB/s to 1700 MiB/s. Other values are about the same.

 

IIRC latency did not increase with software BitLocker - only throughput reduced. The AES throughput of the CPU seems to be the bottleneck.

 

The consume Optane drives don't support hardware BitLocker.