Side Effects of Encrypting an SSD?

[eldiablopotato]

Does anyone know of any data/benchmarks of what happens to an SSD if you encrypt it? Do you basically destroy the SSD, reduce its performance significantly, etc....

 

[Emulex]

Sandforce compresses SSD - compression is a form of encryption if you think about it.

 

[Arsynic]

TrueCrypt or PGP does not damage your SSD. It may slow it down, but it does that to platter HDDs as well and it's due to the processing overhead of encrypting bits on the drive.

 

[Emulex]

well the G3's will have hardware encryption iirc. which i'm guessing will mean they'll have compression too and write back cache with capacitor backup. I'd suspect this takes all the goodness of the indilinx and sandforce and pounds it back at folks.

Keep in mind intel rocks the world in random without using write back or compression - something the other guys have had to rely on. To me sequential is bleh. i want to see a drive saturate sata 3gbps random read/write with decent queue depth

 

[eldiablopotato]

Thanks for the info. Would hardware SSD controllers help with reducing the speed impact of encrypting?

 

[Fayd]

Sandforce compresses SSD - compression is a form of encryption if you think about it.

my understanding is that sandforce natively does AES encryption.

 

[flamenko]

If I can use the TrueCrypt as an example which is a USB but AES 128. When you insert the drive, there are 2 drives one which is blank. The other has a password program and only after providing the password does the other become available. Its hardware encryption which means if you forget the password, your out of luck forever because nobody can break it.

Everything is always encrypted on the drive yet the speeds are not reduced in any manner.

Its not like bitlocker which encrypts ans slows a ssd down to hd speeds.

 

[eldiablopotato]

If I can use the TrueCrypt as an example which is a USB but AES 128. When you insert the drive, there are 2 drives one which is blank. The other has a password program and only after providing the password does the other become available. Its hardware encryption which means if you forget the password, your out of luck forever because nobody can break it.

Everything is always encrypted on the drive yet the speeds are not reduced in any manner.

Its not like bitlocker which encrypts ans slows a ssd down to hd speeds

Hmm interesting, does this only apply to Sandforce SSDs and not the Crucial C300?

 

[flamenko]

Hmm interesting, does this only apply to Sandforce SSDs and not the Crucial C300?

That USB which is technically a SSD uses dual JMicron controllers.