FileVault 2 Performance Numbers

A quick post to demonstrate the differences in performance when FileVault 2 is enabled vs disabled.

Today I re-installed OS X and ran various benchmarking tools (with and without FileVault 2 enabled). Here are the results:

FileVault 2 Enabled:

FileVault 2 Disabled:

As we can see from the numbers above (I ran them repeatedly to ensure there wasn’t much of a difference between runs), the performance penalty is not nearly as pronounced as one might expect. As a result I plan using full-disk encrypting both my laptop and Time Machine backup.