MacBook Pro Security

How does drive encryption affect read/ write performance?

I can answer this for you as my main work MBP has PGP full-disk encryption and my home Macbook doesn't. They were the other way around.

Anyways, the hit on full-disk encryption according to xbench <2%. Also, I couldn't/can't tell the difference in performance on the two.

Works pretty well in my opinion.

Also, the point above about Mac's security being easy to circumvent - well most machines are aren't they? I mean any Windows laptop you can pretty much get into if you can boot it from another device. The Apple gear is no different I guess.

The firmware thing can be gotten around by simply changing the memory :confused: I don't know whether that's supposed to be the case - but it's certainly the case on my Unibody MBP. I upgraded the RAM and the f/w password disappeared. To prove I wasn't going insance I reset another password, and then changed the RAM back, and blamo no more firmware password. could be unique to me of course, haven't tried that on the MB.

Hope that helps +++
 
Picking up on this thread, how does FileVault affect performance on SSDs? I've just installed a new Intel 520 drive in my laptop and it's super fast as you'd expect.

However, I understand that some of that speed comes from the fact that the SSD compresses data internally to increase throughput. I presume that encrypted data cannot be compressed by any great amount.

Is this true and does anyone have experience of SSD performance pre/post encryption with FileVault?
 
Back
Top Bottom