How harmful is it to encrypt an SSD?

Question

Solid State Drives

I know that defragmenting literally kills an SSD, but what about data encryption? How will this affect their lifespan?

Answer 1

Defragmenting is useless on an SSD, it doesn't kill it. Read about rewrite cycles. Even if you overwrite the disc every second, it will live for quite a long time, according to the manufacturers' statements.

Answer 2

How will this affect their lifespan?
No way.
If the chipset uses compression for data transfer (see for example here ), performance drops, since the encrypted data does not compress well.

Answer 3

For almost a year I have had two SSDs in my laptop fully encrypted with TrueCrypt.
The speed dipped by 5-10 percent, but I'm quite satisfied.
They are not going to die.

Answer 4

When I myself was thinking of placing a TrueCrypt disk on my ssd, I came across the fact that if the container is large, then even the most insignificant changes inside it will entail changes in the entire container (because when encrypting two sources that differ by at least one byte, the results ciphers are completely different from each other).
It is clear that manufacturers promise a long life, but their testing (for sure they do this) implies that when writing a 10 kb file, ± 10 kb is written to the disk, and not the size of the entire container of 100 gigs. They changed a small file, but on the ssd it wears out not locally at the place where the small file is written, but at the place of the entire container.
So it turns out that when we work not with native encryption at the file system level, but with crypto containers, disk wear is equal to the total wear for each of the individual files.

Answer 5

The disk degrades when the same physical cell is repeatedly overwritten several thousand times. At the same time, erasing, if I'm not mistaken, is possible only in blocks of 512KB. Modern disk management systems allow you to optimize erasing and writing, group, evenly distribute across all cells of the disk, even if the same file is overwritten many times. Therefore, the total number of overwritten blocks actually affects the durability of a disk. Because of this, since defragmentation is a write hit, it affects the rate of disk degradation. And encryption is unlikely. Although it is possible that this depends on the implementation of encryption. For example, if to change a small piece of information, you need to re-encrypt and overwrite a large piece of data that will be stored in several blocks.
My disk has been fully encrypted with AES for the second year, it is actively used and is not going to die yet.

Answer 6

Well, there are only 2 options:
1) Or he first encrypts and then writes - then this will not affect the lifetime of the system, but only performance.
2) Or he first writes the data, and then encrypts in the background and writes again.
In the second case, it will exhaust its rewrite cycles twice as fast. For example, instead of 200 years, 100 will live
. This may disappoint your grandchildren.
.