Full disk encryption performance?

Take a look at Plausible Deniability in the Mac shareware Espionage.

northernmunky said:

I tested with a collection of files totalling 1.5gb and copying off the drive to the internal SSD seems to take almost 20 mins... Not exactly what I had in mind!

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That could be the USB connection, or more likely you didn't let the encryption finish. I've got all of my internal and external drives encrypted. I can transfer an 8GB file from the external to my internal in less than 2 minutes, and that must include decrypting the file from the external and re-encrypting to the internal (they have different keys).

I think that right-clicking on the drive will give you the updated encryption status.

satcomer said:

Take a look at Plausible Deniability in the Mac shareware Espionage.

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Plausible Deniability has nearly nothing to do with FDE performance.

My experience with FV2 has been that there is definitely no noticeable speed decreases with ssds. Also, with using USB Ext. HDD's, ensure the encryption is complete before making any determinations as far as whether or not it is slower.

nexus4life said:

Plausible Deniability has nearly nothing to do with FDE performance.

My experience with FV2 has been that there is definitely no noticeable speed decreases with ssds. Also, with using USB Ext. HDD's, ensure the encryption is complete before making any determinations as far as whether or not it is slower.

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You are mistaken. If you travel and have an encrypted drive you have by some laws to give the authorities the encryption password. With the shareware I linked the computer drive looks like it was almost new when they search your laptop.

Plus full encryption will slow down any drive because encrytion needs cycles to encrypt and keep encrypted. Just encrypting certain folders and hiding them will cause minimal cycles and look harmless to non Mac experts.

satcomer said:

You are mistaken. If you travel and have an encrypted drive you have by some laws to give the authorities the encryption password. With the shareware I linked the computer drive looks like it was almost new when they search your laptop.

Plus full encryption will slow down any drive because encrytion needs cycles to encrypt and keep encrypted. Just encrypting certain folders and hiding them will cause minimal cycles and look harmless to non Mac experts.

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My friend, I have been addressing the #1 thing this topic has asked about: performance. While you are correct that in some places you are obligated to decrypt the drive or give them the decryption key, this has absolutely nothing to do with the one thing I've been focusing on, again, performance. Sorry for any confusion.

nexus4life said:

My friend, I have been addressing the #1 thing this topic has asked about: performance. While you are correct that in some places you are obligated to decrypt the drive or give them the decryption key, this has absolutely nothing to do with the one thing I've been focusing on, again, performance. Sorry for any confusion.

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Then what did my last sentence talk about. I am trying to convince the op that since full encryption can eat cycles doing the encryptions that using the Espionage app he can have the normal performance and ALSO have Plausible Deniability when traveling to non Mac users since that app will make his Mac look normal to whom would be searching his device. I say this since if an authority searches his Mac at any travel point.

I'm a bit wary of the full-disk encryption. I used it on my Time Machine drive for a few months and had some bad experiences. In one case the power went out and the drive came back online corrupted and unrecoverable; I reformatted and encrypted it from the start. Yet a few months later, the volume became corrupted again and couldn't be recovered; I don't recall it occurring due to a power outage that time, it was just random. I don't recall the error message, but there seemed to be some issue over the encryption - it kept asking for my password to mount the drive, but wouldn't accept it even though I knew what it was. By comparison, I've been able to fix the rare file system corruption issues that arise on my other drives without any problems.

Granted, Time Machine tends to make things complicated... but I didn't like the way that all worked out. Maybe if I ever buy an uninterruptible power supply and have my hard drives wired to it then I'll try again.

I didn't notice any issues performance-wise, for what it's worth...