Bitlocker Encryption Performance

[leo2kp]

Does anyone have any insight as to why a computer would virtually stall and become almost completely unresponsive while BitLocker is encrypting and you're installing apps at the same time? This is an issue we're having exclusively on Lenovo T510 laptops with Core i5 CPUs with AES extensions and TPM enabled.

Before you say like "duh, it's doing a million things at the same time", the HDD flickers maybe once every few minutes and the CPU sits around 2% utilization. The process is much faster doing the same exact stuff on a T61 laptop with a Core 2. Sure it has a smaller HDD, but it's solid. It works the whole time. The T510 doesn't.

I can't imaging AES extensions causing this issue. It does appear to only happen while we are installing other applications, which leads me to wonder if NCQ isn't getting confused. I will be getting another T510 soon for testing, but I wanted to see if anyone else has run in to this issue?

 

[hang-the-9]

I would not mess with drives while they are encrypting, let it finish first. You are thrashing the disk around and if encryption fails you need to re-build the system.

If you are using full disk encryption, it needs to encrypt every sector on the drive, when you are working with the computer while it's doing that, you are causing the disk heads to go all over the place.

Let it encrypt, then install the software. Or the other way around.

As to your actuall question, no clue why it works better on the older laptop.

 

[leo2kp]

There are numerous Microsoft KB articles that suggest that installing or working while encrypting is fine. In fact, I've imaged hundreds of machines installing dozens of apps during the encryption process using PointSec without so much as a hickup, so it's probably not as dangerous as you think. You can even pull the plug out of a machine during the encryption process without losing data. Pretty safe IMO.

Anyway, you didn't answer my question, but thanks? :-/