In short: Home windows 11 Professional ships with a safety characteristic that would severely hamper your solid-state drive’s efficiency. Thankfully, it’s simple sufficient to show off however some may not even know it’s enabled by default.
BitLocker encryption in Home windows 11 Professional is designed to safeguard information and guarantee it’s only accessible by licensed people, nevertheless it comes with a steep efficiency penalty. To learn how a lot of an impression it might have, Tom’s {Hardware} lately performed exams underneath three eventualities: unencrypted (no BitLocker), software-enabled BitLocker (the Home windows 11 Professional default), and hardware-based BitLocker.
The crew used a 4 TB Samsung 990 Professional SSD working Home windows 11 Professional (22H2, with all patches put in) paired with an Intel Core i9-12900K and 32 GB of DDR4 RAM for testing.
In PCMark 10’s storage benchmark, the software-enabled BitLocker configuration resulted in a 20 p.c slowdown over the {hardware} variant and no encryption. An analogous slowdown was noticed in Crystal Disk Mark’s random learn take a look at, and within the random write take a look at, Tom’s noticed a large 45 p.c efficiency hit. In DiskBench’s 50 GB copy switch take a look at, the software-enabled BitLocker setup was 11 p.c slower.
The excellent news is that the hardware-based setup carried out in keeping with not having any encryption working in any respect. In case you insist on having encryption, that would definitely be the best way to go.
The total slate of take a look at outcomes might be discovered over on Tom’s {Hardware} for people who need to be taught extra. In addition they define inform in case you have encryption working and disable it if you happen to do. Briefly, if you’re working Home windows 10 Professional, it in all probability is not enabled; if you’re on Home windows 11 House, it will not be enabled; in case you have Home windows 11 Professional, test as a result of it in all probability is enabled.
It is also price noting that your mileage will range relying on what drive and CPU you’re working. A chip that is considerably much less highly effective than the Intel Core i9-12900K Tom’s {Hardware} used might carry out even worse.
