May 4, 20215 yr I've been reading about the encryption feature but did not find much information about the expected performance hit. I'm worried that my aging 4-core system would be far too weak for it and that I should not even bother trying turning it on: B75 Pro3-M, i7-2600K, 4x4GB DDR3. I use 1 parity + 5 data disks without a cache drive. By using turbo writes, my write speed to the array is limited by the gigabit ethernet. I can already hit 50% CPU utilization if I, for example, use mc to copy lots of data and run some background docker apps. I'm thinking I don't have much headroom and seeing my speed drop to something like 50 MB/s with encryption would not be great at all. Thank you for sharing any experience or feedback.
May 5, 20215 yr Community Expert If the CPU supports the AES-NI instruction set you shouldn't notice any significant performance hit, and IIRC your CPU does.
May 5, 20215 yr Your CPU does indeed have the AES-NI instruction set. I'd just go ahead and encrypt! https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/52214/intel-core-i7-2600k-processor-8m-cache-up-to-3-80-ghz.html Intel® AES New Instructions - Yes
May 17, 20215 yr Author Thanks for the info. I’m preparing to build my second unraid machine and once that’s done, I will encrypt the 2600K one. I’ll report back whether there was any impact on the speed, but it will probably take me a few weeks :)
May 26, 20215 yr Author I'm happy to report that the effect of using encryption (xfs) on all array data disks and all cache pools has been negligible in my situation. Not only are the read/write speeds unchanged, the CPU utilization remains comparable to before. Note that I am not running any VMs, only a couple of dockers (Plex, downloaders ...). I only noticed one peculiarity, but I'm unsure if encryption had anything to do with it. To avoid shuffling the data and encrypting the drives one by one, I copied the entire array to another NAS, deleted all partitions and set a new configuration (essentially building the array anew) and then copied everything back. When I initiated the formatting of the 5 data drives to xfs-encrypted, the CPU usage spiked to 100% on all cores for about 3-5 minutes. Within this timeframe, the UnRAID web interface was completely unresponsive for about 2 minutes. However, this may simply be considered normal operation? The previous time I built an array from scratch and formatted all the drives was in 2011, so I really can't make a comparison Edited May 26, 20215 yr by MadDiplomat Spelling
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