I’m running this laptop at work that has full disk encryption and a real-time virus scanner on it and it feels like it’s dog slow all the time. It’s not a CPU or memory issue, either - it’s that my disk is constantly churning and I’m I/O bound.

I knew that the the encryption had an impact, but I never realized how much until I found these benchmarks. Looks like I’m about doubling the amount of time it takes for disk I/O, not counting the real-time virus scanner overhead.

I’m all about security and all, but man, what I wouldn’t give to just have a separate data partition encrypted and leave the system partition unencrypted.