Re: How much does disk encryption add to boot time?

[Jordan Wiens <numatrix () UFL EDU>]

Other have already chimed in with their findings on this and I'd
figure I'd point out one of the reasons why that's the case -- the
boot process is bottlenecked almost the entire time by the hard drive
rather than the CPU.  The biggest impact on a system with encryption
is not extra drive reads or writes, but extra work for the CPU.  Most
modern systems have CPUs that are highly under-utilized (which is why
there are power saving technologies in laptops that automatically
throttle down the CPU clock speed when it's not needed), so if
there's noticeable degradation in system performance on a modern
machine using encryption, there's probably something wrong with that
implementation.

--
Jordan Wiens, CISSP
UF Network Security Engineer
(352)392-2061

On May 2, 2007, at 10:43 AM, David Millar wrote:

> Does anyone have experience with roughly how much additional time
> it takes to boot a typical late-model office laptop (or desktop)?
> We aren't talking hours here I hope.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Dave Millar
> University Information Security Officer
> University of Pennsylvania