5
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What are your thoughts on using an SSD with Apple's FileVault hard disk encryption?
- Will it shorten the lifespan?
- Will it decrease the read/write performance?
5
1
What are your thoughts on using an SSD with Apple's FileVault hard disk encryption?
4
For the home directory, all files written to the SSD will be 8 MB (the default size of bands within a sparse bundle disk image).
Whether writes of those 8 MB bands will cause more or less degradation, than writes without FileVault 1, will depend on factors such as:
— so for the lifespan part of the question, there can be no one answer for all users of FileVault 1.
Initial conversion will affect all on-disk bytes. Beyond those initial writes — after conversion is complete — writes with FileVault 2 should have an effect on lifespan no different from writes without.
In Ask Different:
diskutil(8) Mac OS X Manual Page — expect this to be updated for Mac OS X 10.7 in due course
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It will decrease read/write performance since encryption does cost a little bit of processor time. I would expect less that 10% impact on average.
Lifespan should not be shorter since same amount of data is going to drive regardless of whether it is encrypted or not.
Thank you, I know only a little about SSDs, I think it'll be good to consider a variety of questions and answers … – Graham Perrin – 2011-08-07T23:46:08.593