Encrypt a VM on a SSD drive

[davidst99]

Hi,

I have a Samsung 840 500 EVO and recently bought VMWare Workstation 11 which provides encryption of VMs. I read that it's not good to encrypt your SSD drive because of excess read and rights but is it ok to encrypt a VM on a SSD drive? The VM is only about 60GB. Thanks.

David

 

[CoPhotoGuy]

It's still going to do encryption within the VMDK and reading/writing to the VMDK is still reading/writing to your hard drive. It is still software-based encryption. I hadn't heard not to do encryption on an SSD myself, but I don't deal a lot with encryption. I actually hadn't taken a look at WS11 just yet and didn't know we introduced encryption. That could lead to some interesting things.

 

[davidst99]

Ok thanks. I really don't really have a need to encrypt a VM. I was just wondering if it would bad for the drive. I bought VMWare Workstation 11 for the fact you can use GPU memory (or at least more) to increase the graphic performance.

 

[Wall Street]

I don't think that it would be that bad. Early Sandforce based SSDs benefited from having compressible data and encrypted data is not compressible, however, modern drives do not have that same characteristic.