OS encryption results in 1/4th the speed of my HDD

[Grx]

Hi there, I had encrypted my OS drive with VeraVrypt, but it took ~5 minutes to boot into windows 10 and be able to open something...

 

I have re-installed windows on the drive to retry the encryption, thinking maybe that will fix the problem (it didn't), and I also ran a few CrystalDisk Mark tests before and after the encryption. (Something to note, I have also "shrunk" the C: drive from 1Tb to 470Gb so it wouldn't take as long to encrypt. Don't know if that affects performance or not.)

 

As you can see, "Test 2" was done before encryption, I was getting 1.2 - 1.3 MB/s in the first two 4KiB tests and 0.4 MB/s Reads in the last, but after encryption, strangely the sequential speeds got a bit faster, the Writes dropped a litle bit, but the Reads are now in the 0.2 - 0.3 MB/s range... (I have a 5400Rpm laptop hdd that's around 3yrs old)

 

I was looking into buying an ssd, but then I saw some posts saying that modern cpus can handle encryption just fine and the speed of the HDD shouldn't be affected to much, if at all... So is this a problem with my slow HDD or my CPU?

The laptop I use is an XPS 15 9550 with a core i5 6300HQ (running at 2.3GHz) and 8Gb ram (with around 4Gb of it being used)

[vorticalbox]

Why are you not using bitlocker?

[Grx]

4 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

Why are you not using bitlocker?

It's a pro only feature.

[Grx]

Bump

[LAwLz]

Full disk encryption is generally a bad idea on hard drives. Your CPU can handle it very well, as you can see in the sequential read tests (and also the fact that it supports AES-NI), but once you start doing random read and writes your hard drive will have to seek much more with an encrypted drive than with an encrypted one, and as you can see that really affects performance.

 

 

On 2018-08-09 at 1:03 PM, vorticalbox said:

Why are you not using bitlocker?

Several reasons why Veracrypt is better than Bitlocker. The big one is that Bitlocker is closed source and you can therefore not validate that it doesn't have backdoors. In fact, having recovery keys is one of the selling points of Bitlocker to big corporations. 

His computer might not have a TPM chip either.

[Grx]

27 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Full disk encryption is generally a bad idea on hard drives. Your CPU can handle it very well, as you can see in the sequential read tests (and also the fact that it supports AES-NI), but once you start doing random read and writes your hard drive will have to seek much more with an encrypted drive than with an encrypted one, and as you can see that really affects performance.

Thank God the CPU isn’t the problem

So would upgrading to an SSD solve the problem? If yes, would a sata III m.2 do the trick, or should I splurge for a NVMe m.2?