How do the old Filevault and the new Lion full disk encryption compare speed wise?
ATM I am using Snow Leppard with FileVault to encrypt my whole home directory, which makes opening IPhoto, Chrome or ITunes annoyingly slow.
FileVault Speed Comparison – Old vs. Lion’s Full Disk Encryption
encryptionfilevaultmacos
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Best Answer
It is faster in practice when writing changes to the disk - the new block encryption is hard to measure (meaning it's a negligible slowdown).
The new implementation removes nearly all of the compacting, and delay in creating and tearing down an encrypted space. It generally allows you to continue working while the bit grinding happens in the background.
The effort to shift a whole drive to encrypted blocks happens in the background while you can still use the mac but it's no different than waiting to turn on or off the old encryption.
In practice the new is far better performing across the board and has less times when you have to wait for it to do some long operation.