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I have a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD. It is going to be used as a second SSD in a Windows 7 laptop. I have encrypted it with Truecrypt and tested it with Crystal Disk Mark, and I am getting 165 MB/s read/write speeds after encryption. According to the Samsung 840 EVO review video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1bumZr2WjI#t=686

at the 11:25 minute mark, this drive should be getting 500 MB/s read/write speeds. When i run the Samsung Magician software to install the firmware, it says that it cannot detect the drive (probably because it is encrypted). But this drive shows up with its own drive letter because I encrypted the drive itself and not just a partition.

Does anyone have any idea of how I can get better performance from this drive? maybe there is a better way to encrypt this second SSD. It is just required to have this drive encrypted for PCI compliance as it will be installed into a laptop.

Thanks for your help and replies.

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2 Answers 2

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Realize the benchmark in TrueCrypt is only a memory/CPU benchmark and has nothing to with drive access at all.

With a full encrypted SSD and CPU with AES with SATA3/6.0 expect about 300MB/s read/write on a Samsung SSD with no sandforce controller.

If the 840 EVO is getting only 165MB/s, then the TLC must be handicapping the drive with uncompressible data like a Sandforce controller would.

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  • I had a 32bit test machine i was testing all of this on before I installed it in the end user's laptop. My test machine maxed out at 165MB/s, but once it was in the laptop, it performed alot better.
    – midacts
    Mar 13, 2014 at 10:17
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What encryption type did you use (Currently AES is the only supported hardware accelerated encryption)?

Is AES hardware accelerated with your CPU (Not all CPUs have this instruction set)?

Typically, I will look at the benchmarks of my TrueCrypt on the computer that I am installing the SSD on. I make sure that the encryption type that I use near matches the performance of the SSD that I'm installing. This way I will not be sacrificing performance. In my case, AES is really fast on my computer, but since my SSD has a rating around 450MB/s, I use AES-Twofish.

If your CPU does not support Hardware accelerated AES, you may never reach the full potential of your SSD.

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This benchmark can be accessed under Settings > Performance > Benchmark.

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  • Wow, that was really helpful. I did not know that Truecrypt had that Benchmark capability. I have always just used AES encryption and used RIPEMD-160 as the Hash Algorithm. Currently I have been setting this SSD up on test computer, so its CPU is different that the laptop that it will be installed on. This test PC does not have Hardware-accelerated AES, thats why its maxes our at about 180MB/s with AES. I will hop on the actual laptop and check to see what the best encryption algorithm is for what machine. Thanks again for your reply!
    – midacts
    Feb 18, 2014 at 18:29
  • So i ran that benchmark on on the actual laptop, and it get 2.1 GB/s encryption and 2.0 GB/s decryption with AES. Ive not run anything like crystal disk mark wth that SSD installed on there, but hopefully it should be more in line with what the manufactuerer states it should be getting performance wise. Thank you guys so much for your help. I didn't know what I was doing wrong or if i could fix it...i was getting really worried with it only getting 165MB/s to start with :D
    – midacts
    Feb 18, 2014 at 19:05

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