RAID Array / Disk Performance with Bitlocker - unexpected results
I've doing some testing on a system to identify the impact that Bitlocker Encryption has on the read/write performance and the results have been interesting to say the least; I'm hoping someone can help to explain my findings. I'm using an entry level server with quad core Xeon E-2224 CPU and 16GB RAM which has Windows Sever 2016 Standard installed - and it's a totally fresh Windows install with all of the latest relevant drivers are installed. My storage array is configured through the integrated controller on the motherboard and is across 4 x 10TB WD Enterprise disks configured as follows: RAID Level RAID5 Legacy Disk Geometry (C/H/S) 65535/255/32 Strip Size 64 KiB Full Stripe Size 192 KiB Disk 0 WDC WD102KRYZ-0 Disk 1 WDC WD102KRYZ-0 Disk 2 WDC WD102KRYZ-0 Disk 3 WDC WD102KRYZ-0 I've provisioned a single large logical volume and I've created two partitions for my testing as follows: Drive Capacity File System Allocation Unit Size Y: 100 GB NTFS 4096 bytes Z: 25,600 GB NTFS 8192 bytes I ran an array of tests (results attached) on the volumes before encryption, then reformatted and encrypted the volumes and same tests again. The results have been very interesting, I was expecting to see a small performance hit across all tests due to Bitlocker, but what I found was that some tests had a drastic performance decrease, in some cases up to 50%, and surprisingly some tests showed an increase in performance, in one case an increase of 60%. Can anyone help to explain this? I'm thinking of running the tests again with another product to see if I get similar results, but what I'm using is fairly robust/reliable from my experience. Findings are in the spreadsheet attached.
