Tested: Windows 11 Pro's On-By-Default Encryption Slows SSDs Up to 45%

Doesn't really seem like news to me, encryption makes communication slower, that's pretty standard.

It sounds like the article is an update to the age old performance issue discussions between hardware and software RAID solutions.

If you use a software solution for anything where there's a dedicated hardware solution, the software solution is always slower due to CPU overhead.

Article recommendation boils down to: If you're going to use encryption, and you want your full disk speed, use a hardware encryption solution. In their test their hardware supported OPAL.

More reason not to switch. 🙂👍

This article starts off with some inaccurate information right from the onset, so it leaves me with some credibility concerns that incline me to do some of my own testing.

Since Windows 10 1803, both Windows 10 and 11 Home and Pro have automatically enabled Bitlocker Encryption during the Out Of Box Experience (OOBE) as long as the following conditions are met:

• The device is UEFI and Secure Boot enabled
• The device has a TPM2.0 device that is enabled
• There are no un-allowed Direct Memory Access (DMA) capable devices on a DMA capable bus.
• The user signed in using a Microsoft Account and had an active internet connection at the time.

It is not specific to Windows 11 and has nothing to do with Home/Pro. This has been going on since 2018.

They also mention encryption built-in to SSDs. That is a fundamentally different kind of encryption. With Bitlocker, removing an SSD from a device or accessing it from anything but the original Windows environment will require the user to enter a 25-digit key to gain data access. Without Bitlocker, the on-disk encryption does not prevent data access in those scenarios. That encryption key exists primarily so that you can secure erase the disk by changing the encryption key. The alternative is a block-level erasure, which would put wear and tear on the SSD.

Pretty disappointing to see this coming from an otherwise reputable source like Tom’s Hardware.

First thing i do is disable bitlocker. Its PITA when dualbooting too

With such a severe slowdown, does that also mean it's going to be increasing usage of the drive and therefore shorten its lifespan?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

While many SSDs come with hardware-based encryption, which does all the processing directly on the drive, Windows 11 Pro force-enables the software version of BitLocker during installation, without providing a clear way to opt out.

While we have results for higher queue depths, note that the QD1 numbers are far more meaningful in the real world, as this is the most common type of file access in typical operating system environments... and that's where software BitLocker impacted performance the most.

Lower latency delivers snappier performance in day-to-day use, and it's the primary reason the industry at large has moved from slow rotating hard drives to faster SSDs.

Given that this extra layer of latency, albeit at varying degrees, will also be added to slower types of SSDs, like QLC or low-tier drives, this could have a much bigger real-world impact in some systems.

Windows 11 disk caching might be a factor there, but QD256 is basically fantasy land for storage workloads (remember, low queue depths are the most common), so we don't put too much weight on it.

There's a curious "bump" with the 990 Pro that we've noted before on the read speeds, but write performance shows a smoother line with the software BitLocker trailing up until the 256KiB block size.

The original article contains 2,491 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!