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Forum Discussion
RN104: 50 % performance hit for encrypting?
In trying to decide whether to encrypt my drives on my new RN104 I came across this Facebook entry, purportedly from someone with Netgear: <<< ReadyNAS Niklas, there is a read/write performance ov...
I wouldn't encrypt with the RN104.
It's CPU is already too weak to provide full disk speed, it doesn't even keep up with a single Gbit card. Activating encryption will sure slow it down, I don't know by how much though (but will definitely be a two digit number, 50% seems a little too much if you ask me but 30% to 40% would seem plausible to me, although I've never tested so can't know for sure). Even anti-virus is slowing it down easily, so if you wanna go Encryption + anti-virus expect really poor performance.
What you can do is use truecrypt (or equivalent) on top of the NAS. The computer will do the heavy lifting and the NAS will operate at normal speed for non-encrypted files. It could affect Snapshots and virus scan though since you would have only a big encrypted file but if you have sensitive data that are not updated frequently or that don't take to much space you can give it a try.
So I can't tell you what impact it will have on the speed but I can tell you it won't help to speed things up anyhow, I would secure the NAS without encryption and use a computer to cypher anything needed. Drive encryption is useful mostly when drives are stolen which is the case with laptops, phones or that kind of devices. If you do a good job securing physical access to the NAS there should be no need for this.
More over using true crypt will ensure 2 authentication (one for the NAS, and one for the file) whereas drive encryption will not help if someone bypasses samba/AFP authentication.
It's CPU is already too weak to provide full disk speed, it doesn't even keep up with a single Gbit card. Activating encryption will sure slow it down, I don't know by how much though (but will definitely be a two digit number, 50% seems a little too much if you ask me but 30% to 40% would seem plausible to me, although I've never tested so can't know for sure). Even anti-virus is slowing it down easily, so if you wanna go Encryption + anti-virus expect really poor performance.
What you can do is use truecrypt (or equivalent) on top of the NAS. The computer will do the heavy lifting and the NAS will operate at normal speed for non-encrypted files. It could affect Snapshots and virus scan though since you would have only a big encrypted file but if you have sensitive data that are not updated frequently or that don't take to much space you can give it a try.
So I can't tell you what impact it will have on the speed but I can tell you it won't help to speed things up anyhow, I would secure the NAS without encryption and use a computer to cypher anything needed. Drive encryption is useful mostly when drives are stolen which is the case with laptops, phones or that kind of devices. If you do a good job securing physical access to the NAS there should be no need for this.
More over using true crypt will ensure 2 authentication (one for the NAS, and one for the file) whereas drive encryption will not help if someone bypasses samba/AFP authentication.
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