Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com news on October 19, it may be very rare for SSD performance to degrade due to software problems, but unfortunately, Windows 11 has this problem. PC pre-installed with Win11 Professional Edition by some manufacturers will enable BitLocker software encryption by default, which will lead to a sharp slowdown in SSD, even up to 45%, because the processor needs to encrypt and decrypt each piece of data.

According to the test of TomsHardWare, BitLocker has the greatest impact on the random read and write operations of the overall performance of PC, but even continuous transmission will be affected to a certain extent.

It is worth mentioning that standard BitLocker encryption is only available in Windows 11 Professional Edition and above. Windows 11 Home Edition does not support standard BitLocker encryption, but provides a similar 'device encryption' feature.

To explore the impact of BitLocker on performance, TomsHardWare conducted comparative tests in three scenarios: unencrypted, BitLocker software encryption (Windows 11 Pro default), and hardware encryption (OPAL).

How to determine if BitLocker is enabled you can check the encryption status of the drive through CMD, run the command prompt as an administrator, and then type manage-bde-status on the command line.

Then, you need to find the following two fields: Conversion Status (transition state) and Encryption Method (encryption method).

Where Conversion Status will show whether you enable encryption, while Encryption Method will show whether it is hardware encryption or software encryption. If it is shown as "XTS-AES" as above, it is BitLocker software encryption; if it is displayed as "Hardware Encryption", it represents BitLocker hardware encryption.

The Windows 11 BitLocker performance test platform is based on i9-12900K processors, 32GB DDR4 memory, and 4TB's Samsung 990 Pro solid state drive, using the latest version of Windows 11 Pro (22H2, all updates are patched). The PCMark 10 test results are shown in the following figure:

Oddly enough, hardware encryption (OPAL) performs even better than unencrypted (no BitLocker) mode, and the results remain consistent after repeated tests.

As you can see from the figure, the score when encrypted using OPAL hardware is about 620 MB/s (±10 MB/s); the unencrypted speed is close to 607 MB/s (±10 MB/s).

However, when BitLocker software encryption is enabled, the speed directly slows down to 490 MB/s (±10 MB/s), which is about 21%. The experience is quite obvious.

In other words, the Samsung 990 Pro has dropped from a flagship SSD-class performance to just enough, about the same level as the Netac NV7000.

Later, the platform showed more obvious results in the CrystalDiskMark 8 test. It is worth mentioning that QD1 is more meaningful in the actual operating system environment, and this is precisely where BitLocker has the greatest impact on performance.

The results show that the random read IOPS is about 20% lower than the unencrypted result, and the read latency, which is the most important feature of the flagship SSD, has increased by about 25% from slightly more than 40 microseconds to nearly 51 microseconds.

The most critical point is that the random write performance of BitLocker software is reduced by as much as 45% compared with hardware encryption. In other words, when BitLocker is enabled, the random write speed of QD1 is basically half that of the original.

At the practical application level, TomsHardWare replicates or reads 50GB data through DiskBench, and the results show that the read and write performance is the best when unencrypted, followed by hardware encryption, while the file replication performance after BitLocker software encryption is reduced by 11%, and the read speed (for large files of a single 50GB) is slow by 3%.

Finally, TomsHardWare contacted several OEM vendors, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, who said their Windows 11 Pro products all use software-based encryption. Therefore, we recommend that you check whether your PC is enabled for BitLocker encryption, software encryption or hardware encryption when you have time.

Disable BitLocker encryption if you don't think encryption is needed, the easiest way is to turn off BitLocker.

To turn off BitLocker, first open the command prompt (CMD) as an administrator and enter manage-bde off C: (CTOnews.com Note: if your encrypted drive is not C, replace C: with a different drive letter).

The worst-case scenario of switching to hardware BitLocker encryption is that if your Windows 11 Pro runs BitLocker software encryption, you can only reinstall the system, because no other way can completely fix the BitLocker problem.

First, you need to start Windows 2 Go (or use SSD as a non-system drive for PC), install Samsung Magician, enable encryption on the drive, then use "securely erase the drive" to generate a new block ID, then create a Windows 11 installation device without BitLocker enabled (using Rufus), and then install Windows 11 Professional again.

After the installation is complete, open the Group Policy Editor and enable BitLocker hardware encryption support.

After reboot, you can open the CMD check again, still need to run as an administrator, and then type: manage-bde-status.

If all goes well, you will see a prompt similar to the following indicating that the system has hardware encryption enabled. If other content is displayed. So, you're still in software BitLocker mode, so you need to try to reinstall it again.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.