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Re: Encrypting drive



On Monday 02 July 2007 11:35, Anders Breindahl <skrewz@skrewz.dk> wrote:
> In servers, you might want to trust physical security, since
> whole-system encryption incurs a performance degradation. (However, on a
> reasonably recent system, you still will be bottlenecked by Fast
> Ethernet at 100Mb/s).

Where "reasonably fast" means faster than a 3GHz P4.  A 3GHz P4 system I was 
working on recently appeared to be limited to 4MB/s, if it wasn't for the 
fact that the machine is about to be decommissioned then I would probably 
investigate this further as the performance is lower than expected.

> However, if you should choose to encrypt only, say /home, you'd need to
> make sure that data won't ``sieve'' onto the unencrypted parts of the
> system, such as /tmp or swap space.

True.  But the advantage to encrypting only some partitions is that you can 
get better performance for non-secret data.

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