Benchmarking The Performance Cost To Full Disk Encryption For Modern AMD Ryzen Laptops

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 25 October 2023 at 01:39 PM EDT. Page 3 of 3. 30 Comments.

FS-Mark benchmark with settings of Test: 1000 Files, 1MB Size. No Encryption was the fastest.

FS-Mark benchmark with settings of Test: 4000 Files, 32 Sub Dirs, 1MB Size. No Encryption was the fastest.

The FS-Mark benchmark showed minimal impact from having full disk encryption.

Compile Bench benchmark with settings of Test: Initial Create. No Encryption was the fastest.

Timed Linux Kernel Compilation benchmark with settings of Build: defconfig. No Encryption was the fastest.

Timed Mesa Compilation benchmark with settings of Time To Compile. FDE was the fastest.

For workloads like compiling large code-bases, having full disk encryption on this Zen 4 laptop with NVMe storage hadn't impacted the build times.

GIMP benchmark with settings of Test: unsharp-mask. FDE was the fastest.

GIMP benchmark with settings of Test: resize. FDE was the fastest.

GIMP benchmark with settings of Test: rotate. FDE was the fastest.

GIMP benchmark with settings of Test: auto-levels. FDE was the fastest.

For quick-running software tasks relying on opening files from disk like GIMP image manipulation there wasn't any real-world performance impact there either.

Running synthetic I/O benchmarks can sometimes quantify a performance hit to full disk encryption but for most real-world desktop/laptop work-cases outside of running a database sever locally or the like will not find any measurable impairment from using full disk encryption. For as much of a performance junkie as I am, I have no hesitation always making use of full disk encryption when setting up modern Intel and AMD laptops for production use.

CPU Power Consumption Monitor benchmark with settings of Phoronix Test Suite System Monitoring.

The CPU power consumption difference is also minimal of utilizing full disk encryption or not.

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