this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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How bad do Macs slow down with encryption? Or can you even turn it off? They do have a dedicated chip, and section of chip, to handle encryption.
I don't know the answer to this, but somehow I trust apple more to get this right. They make money primarily on hardware, so they have a vested interest in making sure it works properly.
Edit - lol apparently I am wrong
Except for the fact that I'm right. Apparently I struck some kind of nerve. Apple is good at hardware. I use a pixel and I can admit this. They know what they are doing.
You’re right, but not for the reason you’re citing. Apple has its own T2 Secure Enclave which performs encryption. Microsoft relies on the TPM for hosting the keys, but does not use AFAIK hardware encryption and thus slows down significantly.
This article: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/03/03/whats-the-overhead-of-using-apfs-encryption/ shows that for an external drive the overhead on MacOS for encryption is insignificant (less than 5%) in most cases. That’s significantly better than Microsoft.
Even before Apple added custom chips, just using the intel AES instructions, their encryption performance penalty was like 3% https://archive.techarp.com/showarticle0037.html?artno=877&pgno=1
Microsoft is doing something very wrong to end up with this much overhead