The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    What is the Performance impact of Bitlocker Encryption

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by jasfra, Mar 9, 2007.

  1. jasfra

    jasfra Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    54
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Hi,
    I've got a quick question about the Bitlocker feature in Vista Ultimate....I'm planning on using it with a laptop that has TPM....What is the likely performance hit of the computer using this feature....Given that the whole hard drive is in effect encrypted will it make the machine run significantly slower....I've checked on the Microsoft website & while they touch on the fact that there may be a performance 'hit' ,they choose not to eleaborate....

    is anyone currently using it?

    Thanks in advance for the info
     
    jasfra, Mar 9, 2007
    #1
  2. qhn

    qhn Notebook User

    Reputations:
    1,654
    Messages:
    5,955
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    205
    taking in the fact that this functionality is being released only for Enterprise & Ultimate, i doubt that one would notice any performance hit - since the system required to be able to support these 2 versions is quite powerful already.

    i was tempted many times to try this out, but in the end must "just say no" to it. One of the main concern is if anything happen to change to bios (crazy update) or some hard drive malfuntion, this would trigger the protection and one can kiss either goodby to the data or gonna spend beaucoup frustrating hrs to recover. And the support in this area (meaning experts, gurus..) is still very, very thin

    cheers ...
     
    qhn, Mar 9, 2007
    #2
  3. JCheng

    JCheng Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    19
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Maximum PC ran a test on this in the April issue; they didn't give any specs, but they probably did it on a desktop machine. The general idea should be the same on a laptop though.

    Results are as follows (sorry, couldn't figure out how to put a table in):
     
    JCheng, Mar 9, 2007
    #3
  4. qhn

    qhn Notebook User

    Reputations:
    1,654
    Messages:
    5,955
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    205
    ... 20% performance hit !?! (april 2006 result?)
    sorry but looking at the table, it is a 50% hit&miss depending on the app then?

    cheers ...
     
    qhn, Mar 9, 2007
    #4
  5. JCheng

    JCheng Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    19
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Yeah, that's what I got from the table as well. I guess they were referring to the exact difference for one of their benchmarks.

    This is from the April 2007 issue (they always release the issues one month early for some reason), just picked it up today.
     
    JCheng, Mar 9, 2007
    #5
  6. qhn

    qhn Notebook User

    Reputations:
    1,654
    Messages:
    5,955
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    205
    interesting test scenarios/results. Quite bold to say a performance hit of 20%. I personally do not believe that m$ is crazy enough to tout one their extras in order to hit such a performance on a claimed better/faster OS

    but then ... may be we will see some interesting feedback after many users read this "back to the future" issue of Maximum PC

    cheers ..
     
    qhn, Mar 9, 2007
    #6