What about using solid state drives with AES chips built in? would that 
remove the performance hit of a highly used server?

Would a server with several SSD's providing enough storage for the needs 
sufficiently handle the encryption and raid without a performance hit? 
Or is that not what the AES chips in the newer SSD's handle?


On 4/2/2013 9:48 AM, Paul Mooring wrote:
> You could run some tests yourself, but due to the nature of encryption I
> strongly suspect that the overhead added by LVM is negligible.  Encryption
> is supposed to be CPU intensive, like everything else involve security
> it's a tradeoff.  The most important thing to keep in mind is that you
> don't need to care about CPU overhead, if it's lightly used getting your
> files 0.25 seconds later and averaging 60% CPU rather than 40% just
> doesn't matter.
>
> Stepping on my soapbox for a minute here, network/server security is far
> less magical than many make it out to be.  It's really up to you to
> determine how much risk is involved in something and what the costs are to
> mitigate that risk.  In your case if the server isn't heavily used so the
> CPU overhead isn't a problem, the only cost is having to put in a password
> to mount the encrypted drive.  The risk of having sensitive files makes it
> a no brainer to set this up.  Contrast that to a file server being used
> for just public files (say free exes and isos from the internet) that's
> heavily used by an office of people.  In that case setting up encryption
> is definitely more secure and also a very bad idea because the costs are
> greater than the risk.
>
> All that to say, don't pay too much attention to those numbers.  Setting
> this up is pretty straightforward and moving data off the encrypted drive
> is also pretty easy, so just set it up and if it works for you don't worry
> about trying to squeeze that last drop of performance out until you need
> to.

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