TrueCrypt Full Drive Encryption Performance

I know there is a performance hit with TrueCrypt full drive encryption but I was wondering if anyone has done full drive encryption that plays video games. This is the only thing holding me back from trying it. I don't want my games to suddenly become unplayable because of the performance hit.

 

Since no one replied I'm taking it as this is a bad idea so I guess I'll just leave well enough alone.

 

I play counter-strike on a laptop with FDE. I haven't seen any performance hit. To be honest, I haven't seen a performance hit of any kind with FDE using TrueCrypt. 5 year old Thinkpad laptop with dual-core intel and 1GB ram.

My advice is if you store anything personal or sensitive (banking, etc), encrypt. I wouldn't expect it to affect your gaming. I have even read of testers who found improved performance from FDE boxes compared to non-FDE boxes based on how things were piped. Long as you have a fairly modern box, I think worrying about performance hit from FDE is useless worry. But if you have a dedicated gaming machine that does not have personal info, then don't encrypt.

 

Thanks for the reply. I may give it a try then. I have a 3 ghz core 2 duo with 2 gigs of ram so that is similar to your setup. It is good to hear the performance hit isn't all that much if any. Most of the reviews of full drive encryption I have seen talk about the performance hit so that was the reason for the thread.

 

I just listened to an episode of Security Now! with Steve Gibson yesterday. He covered TrueCrypt 5. (Note TrueCrypt is at 7.0a now and performance has been improved). His testing showed a performance GAIN after FDE.

My point in mentioning this is that I really think it's no longer an issue with modern hardware. If there is a performance hit, it is negligible. If you have sensitive data, there really is no good reason not to protect it. Always make backups though when encrypting sensitive data and ensure you won't forget the password.

 

Games are loaded to RAM .
As truecrypt does not encrypt RAM it has NO impact on 'game-performance',
unless you consider level load-times 'game-performance' .
If your CPU is fast enough to run the game, encryption wont be a problem.
Besides, even with a Conroe E6600 your CPU can en/de-crypt double as much data as your electro-mechanical HDD can deliver pr. second ..

 

Thanks for the info. Mine is a Wolfdale E8400 so I should be good on the encryption/decryption then.

 

I have an external drive encrypted which I do everything that I normally do on my C drive or system drive without any noticeable performance impact.

 

Looks like the primary question has been answered, however for more information there's an analysis of the impact of full disk encryption with Truecrypt 7 here:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/truecrypt-aes-ni-encryption,review-32181.html

 

I have read that before. It is a good article but it didn't address my specific questions.

 

I go with no performance hit. I know that, logically, you would think there would be, but my read/write speed tests of my encrypted system is the same as before.

 

I went ahead with it. So far I can't tell much difference. I played Unreal Tournament 2004 to test it out and could not tell any speed difference. Thanks for all the replies.