Earlier this month, we coated a difficulty a couple of “65000” BitLocker encryption error message which was affecting each Home windows 11 in addition to Home windows 10 PCs. And whereas that was solely a reporting concern, one thing else is definitely impacting the efficiency of Home windows 11 Professional PCs.
Tom”s {Hardware} has discovered that the default software-based BitLocker encryption (XTS-AES 128, the place XTX stands for XEX Tweakable Block Cipher with Ciphertext Stealing and AES is Superior Encryption Customary), which is enabled by default on pre-built PCs like laptops and notebooks, amongst others is hitting the efficiency of SSDs fairly laborious. The outlet notes that the impression will be as dangerous as as much as 45%. This report comes scorching on the heels of one other one the place we noticed that Linux (Ubuntu) has continued to develop its lead over Home windows 11 and in some circumstances, it’s greater than twice as quick.
Tom”s {Hardware} says:
We reached out to a number of OEMs, and Dell, HP, and Lenovo advised us they ship programs with Home windows 11 Professional with software-based encryption until a consumer orders an SSD that has hardware-based encryption accessible. It”s not clear in the event that they at all times allow {hardware} encryption on each SSD that helps the characteristic, however if you happen to don”t pay further for such a drive, you”ll seemingly find yourself with diminished storage efficiency. We haven”t acquired a response from a number of different OEMs but, however we suspect most have related insurance policies in place.
To check the efficiency hit, one of many quickest PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs within the type of the Samsung 990 Professional 4TB was used. The least impression was seen within the sequential peak pace assessments. In a DiskBench 50GB file copy take a look at, the drive with software program encryption had a 13% efficiency loss since not like the hardware-accelerated Opal answer, the software program one makes use of the CPU to do the encryption.
The efficiency hit is way worse on random reads and writes although particularly within the Queue Depth 1 (QD1) assessments. Within the 4KB QD1 random learn take a look at, there’s a 21% slowdown within the IOPS (enter/output operations per second). The impression is even higher within the case of random writes because the 990 Professional sees a 46% hit in comparison with {hardware} encryption and a 43% hit in comparison with no encryption:
When the QD is modified to 256, the impression is totally different as {hardware} and software program each see huge slowdowns in efficiency when speaking about writes:
The 4TB 990 Professional examined right here comes with 4GB of LPDDR4 DRAM cache as properly and regardless of that, the slowdown in randoms may be very outstanding. Yow will discover the total take a look at outcomes on the supply hyperlink under.
When you have an OEM pre-built system that got here pre-installed with Home windows 11 Professional, likelihood is it has software program BitLocker enabled. You may examine that by working an elevated command immediate (CMD as an admin) and getting into the command: “manage-bde.exe -status“.
If you achieve this, the Safety standing might be displayed as “Safety On” and within the case of software program encryption, the encryption methodology is about to “XTS-AES 128”. A tool with BitLocker disabled will show “Safety Off” and the Encryption methodology might be “None”.
One other manner to take action is to launch the Disk Administration console and examine to see if the drives present “BitLocker Encrypted” in brackets.
Supply and pictures: Tom”s {Hardware}
