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so am installing (cant post name without grammar issues) on an external drive. when the encryption starts its stating 12 hours. which seems rather high to me but whatever i went in and checked the task manager in regards to if my CPU was overloaded i noticed that it is using 45 MB/s of the disk that got me thinking 45 MB/s for 12 hours wouldn't that ruin my solid state drive? i heard some stuff about they not being able to transfer to much data am i ruining my solid state drive?

iloveyoumommy
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  • 45 MB/s sounds like the throughput attainable by a slow-spinning rotational drive (around 4000-5000 rpm), not a SSD. Also, 45 MB/s for 12 hours is about 2 TB, which isn't a common SSD size (most SSDs are in the hundreds of gigabytes range; this is an order of magnitude higher). Why are you worried about a SSD when what you say clearly points toward that device being a rotational HDD? – user Jun 11 '16 at 20:57
  • It'll be fine. This question is off-topic here anyway because it's about hardware (your ssd) and software (some disk encryption) in general, not about the security of either. I'm certain this question has come up elsewhere on the Internet. Try using a search engine. – Luc Jun 11 '16 at 20:57
  • Michael kjorlin: like i stated am encrypting an external harddisk so this is over usb and my ssd on my laptop is the ssd in question the external harddisk is an hdd however my laptop which encrypts and sends the data over usb to the hdd isn't – iloveyoumommy Jun 11 '16 at 21:11
  • Luc: will it be fine in the long run? will fde increase the disk usage alot? if it has to decrypt and encrypt the entire disk each time a modification is made it sounds like a pain on the ssd? – iloveyoumommy Jun 11 '16 at 21:12
  • What data would be transferring from your SSD, if that's not the one being encrypted? – Dan Getz Jun 11 '16 at 21:14
  • Dan: external harddisk is an hdd however my laptop which encrypts and sends the data over usb to the hdd is a ssd – iloveyoumommy Jun 11 '16 at 21:16
  • Your laptop *has* an SSD, but that doesn't mean all data in memory must be on it. Your laptop also has RAM. – Dan Getz Jun 11 '16 at 21:18
  • task manager says the ssd is using 45 MB/s. the software using that amount is veracrypt veracrypt is only using 5mb of ram – iloveyoumommy Jun 11 '16 at 21:20
  • Only [writes are bad for SSD, reads are not](https://superuser.com/questions/440171/will-reading-data-cause-ssds-to-wear-out). – Lie Ryan Jun 12 '16 at 02:37
  • While this question seems more related to the impact of a sustained "high" transfer rate over long period, which is unrelated to encryption (see RAID recovery for instance) and makes this question out-of-topic, I've written [an answer where I try to tackle the idea about FDE being bad for SDDs](http://security.stackexchange.com/a/135783/32746). – WhiteWinterWolf Sep 03 '16 at 08:26

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No, it's not. Wear and tear are equivalent to the non-FDE.

FDE will encrypt the disk, which indeed requires a rewrite of the whole disk, but only one. After that, the load on the disk is exactly the same as that of a normal disk; the data is either written encrypted instead of in the clear (if FDE is done by the OS) or written normally in the clear and encrypted inside the disk (if FDE is done by the disk hardware).

Just possibly, with SSDs, it might happen that FDE increases the temperature of the disk assembly due to higher CPU load, and this may affect adversely data retention on the cheapest SSD chips. But this is a remote theoretical possibility at worst.

LSerni
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