Gaming on encrypted system (via truecrypt)?

[Heiko]

Does anyone here encrypt their entire hard drive and play games on it at the same time? Mainly I was wondering, what sort of performance degradations would I get if I did so. Are tests such as HDTune accurate if the hard drive has been encrypted?

I plan on running an I7 860 and a Caviar Black 1TB hard drive. I also plan on running multiple games at the same time, firefox with a million tabs open, a virtual machine, and perhaps a few other small things here or there. Perhaps I'm pushing it a little to hard, but I was just curious what other people had to say. :D

[Deveant]

the question is why?...

buy a SSD 64gb drive, encrypt it, and use it to store your OS and day-to-day apps.

put your games on the 1TB.

close VM's when not needed.

I really dont see a point in pushing the CPU that hard, special when its only a 860.

And the answer to your question is simply yes. Encrypting the drive will hinder game preformance. And applications that access lots of files to run will also be slowed, at first maybe not to much, but when you start accessing more files on the drive it will become a bother.

[VaKo]

Full disk encryption will slow down your HDD, try it and run a benchmark or 2 for some numbers.

[ILikeBacon]

Running Samsung 1TB disk (Can't remember model) on Win7 with Ubuntu in VirtualBox, and Firefox, Winamp, iTunes etc open most of the time.

I didn't notice too much performance degradation during the use of apps after TrueCrypting the drive, but noticed a significant change in the loading time of apps, ie. when the drive is loading most of the prog. into memory.

I do have my games on a non-truecrypted drive, along with some other larger programs like Photoshop and Sony Vegas, but when Win7 is running from the encrypted drive, and you have all the programs already loaded into memory, I saw very very little performance difference, yet I do expect that this would be different for running games.

[IOSys]

Encrypting the drive will hinder game preformance.

No it won't, it will increase load-times a tiny bit, but in-game performance will not be

affected the least provided you are not over-taxing the CPU.

Games, like other applications, don't run from disk, they run from RAM .

Anyway, with TrueCrypt a Conroe E6600 can decrypt about 200MB/s,

a quad-core @ 2.4Ghz can handle 400MB/s etc etc .

Show me a non-raided mechanical HDD that comes even close to being able to transfer at those speeds ..

Are tests such as HDTune accurate if the hard drive has been encrypted?

Not the random write benchmark because with a truecrypted disk there ARE no random writes,

the TC-driver makes everything into sequential writes .

PS : Deveant is spot-on.. Get a SSD, it's the best performance-booster around atm ..

It's not really the massive transfer-rates that makes these disks shine, it's the 0.1ms access-time ..

For those of you who think SSD's are way to expensive :

I paid MORE for 8MB !! (YES MB !!!) RAM for my first 486 PC than the going price of a 60GB OCZ Vertex :(

[h3%5kr3w]

@IOSys - You probably paid more for those 8MB than my 1TB green drive :P

60GB OCZ Vertex - Your Price:$239.00 Per newegg.com

WD cavair blue (250gig/7200rpm/ Average Seek Time: 8.9ms)Your Price:$44.99 x5 = 224.95

(theoretical.. avg seek doesnt change no matter how many drives you have, but they only need to seek once per sector of read/write, and have a combined thouroughput of probably 2.5x that vertex drive in raid 50 if not better 'w/backup protection I might add!!')

You really can't drag that into the equation though becuase it's how much something means to someone. I value large ammounts of space for backup and such, so I opted for a big drive. I feel SSDs are still too expensive, and also still too volatile in their operation to be used on a daily basis, but if it's a gaming only PC then I digress.

All in all it always ammounts up to depending on what you really want heiko. Great speed + encryption, avg speed + encryption, or crap speed + encryption. Personally I don't encrypt my data *on my hdd* but then again.. I don't have anything that would be of any value to anyone. Any printable receipts I just print and delete. None of the passwords on my public/private system or online and email passwords are the same as my banking/school pin/etc, I have passwords and cache flushed upon closing of firefox, so no data there and I personally don't care if they go play sauerbraten online under my name, or make a song or two with FLstudio, but then that is me.

I think that sometimes, knowing things like we do, that we tend to get pretty paranoid. Knowing what some of us have done or will do does not help when we look at ourselves and our loved ones, but at the same time, there are (I feel) way more white hats than black, with the majority being in the grey some what, but just remember, that around 97% of the population would not know how to physically hack into a box if it jumped in front of them, and always remember that the teeny tiny bit of theves that DO know anything about computers would reformat first thing so they could turn around and sell the box. Just thought I would throw that in there.

[Deveant]

i do agree with h3%5kr3w, i dont see a point in encrypting personal computers, unless your into lil kiddies, whats there to hide?

[antirem]

I think im missing something... why would you want to do this?

[IOSys]

i do agree with h3%5kr3w, i dont see a point in encrypting personal computers, unless your into lil kiddies, whats there to hide?

You are a good little German .

History shows that people who think they have nothing to hide very often end up DEAD, killed

by the very government supposed to protect your rights . You can go to jail MANY PLACES on this planet just for having "undesirable", "immoral" or "subversive" books, movies, newspapers etc .

In China you go to jail for a friggin' PLAYBOY !!!

Besides, encrypting your data protects it against computer-stealing scumbags and everybody else who shouldn't be poking around in your personal records, including tyrannical governments .

You know, things like the digital signature you use for your online banking, financial records, your address-book,

"private" photos of your girlfriend(s) etc etc .. Or you may have a JOB that requires you to handle personal information about other people, information that might be required by law to be kept safe and confidential .

So, don't give me that crappy strawman argument about paedophiles and terrorists,

it is the argument of shills, idiots or both .

[Return==404]

You are a good little German .

History shows that people who think they have nothing to hide very often end up DEAD, killed

...... ramble .....

it is the argument of shills, idiots or both .

So I presume that you don't have a PIN code on your personal cell phone? Or maybe you don't have a Windows logon password? Maybe your Hak5 forum password is 123?

We protect personal belongings because they're personal . Don't be so hypercritical. It doesn't look good when you hate on someone for wanting to keep their personal data personal.

[Uncle Toxie]

It's not a question of whether or not you're paranoid, it's if your paranoid ENOUGH.

[ILikeBacon]

So I presume that you don't have a PIN code on your personal cell phone? Or maybe you don't have a Windows logon password? Maybe your Hak5 forum password is 123?

We protect personal belongings because they're personal . Don't be so hypercritical. It doesn't look good when you hate on someone for wanting to keep their personal data personal.

I think if you read it he's not hating on people for wanting to keep personal data personal - he's defending the people who want to keep their personal data personal.