I also can’t say that it has “constant” effect on your performance, because it’s only about disk operations, nothing else. But this is the same with or without encryption. Startup tends to be particularly disk intensive, as the operating system and all your startup applications and data are read from (or written to) the disk. It’s simply something that happens as your computer reads and writes data to and from the encrypted disk. There’s no specific time when whole-disk encryption has more or less impact. In comparison to the amount of time required to get the data on and off the disk - which is the same whether it’s encrypted or not - the additional time it takes to encrypt or decrypt that data is amazingly small. As complex as it may be, though, today’s CPUs are more than capable of handling the work without breaking a digital sweat. Encryption can be a (very) complex mathematical calculation. You’re more likely to notice the impact of a slower drive than you are to notice whether the data is being encrypted.ĬPU speeds, as well as the number of CPUs available on a PC, directly impacts the performance impact of encryption. In general, speed is the first thing we think of when it comes to read/write performance, whether your data is encrypted or not.

While not directly impacting encryption, the speed of hard disks - both SSD and HDD - is impressive. That means the apparent performance of your disk when encryption is at play is gauged by two things: the speed of the disk itself and the speed of your CPU.īoth have been getting significantly faster over time. Whole-disk encryption kicks in when things are written to or read from the disk. I’ll put it this way: I wouldn’t let performance concerns hold you back from using whole-disk encryption. Encryption in general, and whole-disk encryption specifically, has come a long way since it was first introduced many years ago. One of the most striking changes is its impact on performance.

Veracrypt whole disk