Sophos Safeguard Encryption and System Performance

Hello Noelle,

You shouldn't notice much difference, though some systems will be affected more than others. Providing you have a decent setup you shouldn't notice any difference at all.

I've managed to put together the following based on a system with a Thinkpad X61 running Windows 7 SP1 Enterprise using BitLocker encryption.
BitLocker is used for the actual encryption on Windows 8.1 / Windows 10 systems, but the algorithm is the same (AES).
With a T7300 2.0GHz processor and Kingston V100 64gb SSD the results are:

Sequential read: 243 MB/s (not encrypted) 140 MB/s (encrypted)

Sequential write: 74.5 MB/s (not encrypted) 51 MB/s (encrypted)

Random read: 176 MB/s (not encrypted) 100 MB/s (encrypted)

Random write: Speeds are almost identical.

In this particular scenario the processor is probably what causes the bottleneck, in the wild however the boot time is about the same.
A cold launch of Opera 11.5 with 79 tabs remained the same (encrypted vs not encrypted): 4 seconds for all tabs to be opened.

A small project build in Visual Studio 2010 took 2 seconds to load (encrypted / not encrypted).
A larger build took 2 seconds (not encrypted) versus 5 seconds (encrypted).

The hardware of the machine plays a huge part, especially the processor, RAM and whether or not you're using an SSD (which is much faster than a regular HDD).
If the processor has hardware AES compilation this will also make a difference.

I hope this helps Noelle.

Hello Noelle,

You shouldn't notice much difference, though some systems will be affected more than others. Providing you have a decent setup you shouldn't notice any difference at all.

I've managed to put together the following based on a system with a Thinkpad X61 running Windows 7 SP1 Enterprise using BitLocker encryption.
BitLocker is used for the actual encryption on Windows 8.1 / Windows 10 systems, but the algorithm is the same (AES).
With a T7300 2.0GHz processor and Kingston V100 64gb SSD the results are:

Sequential read: 243 MB/s (not encrypted) 140 MB/s (encrypted)

Sequential write: 74.5 MB/s (not encrypted) 51 MB/s (encrypted)

Random read: 176 MB/s (not encrypted) 100 MB/s (encrypted)

Random write: Speeds are almost identical.

In this particular scenario the processor is probably what causes the bottleneck, in the wild however the boot time is about the same.
A cold launch of Opera 11.5 with 79 tabs remained the same (encrypted vs not encrypted): 4 seconds for all tabs to be opened.

A small project build in Visual Studio 2010 took 2 seconds to load (encrypted / not encrypted).
A larger build took 2 seconds (not encrypted) versus 5 seconds (encrypted).

The hardware of the machine plays a huge part, especially the processor, RAM and whether or not you're using an SSD (which is much faster than a regular HDD).
If the processor has hardware AES compilation this will also make a difference.

I hope this helps Noelle.