Disk encryption performance

[Pafegori]

Hi,

 

I am currently using a raid5 hardware box which i have encrypted with truecrypt. The read/write speed is perfect, but the hardware is not very reliable.

I want to replace that with an jbod box and clouddrive for encryption and drivepool, well for pooling.

 

because I want single disks to still be usable on their own, I intent to create a encrypted "clouddrive" with local disk provider on every disk and then pool them.

 

But I am concerned about the many layers. I have an file based system (pool) on top of an block level device (cloud) on top of a standard file system again on block level harddrive. I would be great if coulddrive could be used like truecrypt for providers which support block level access (like local disk)

Then there would be one layer less inbetween.

 

Is my concern justified or would the performance difference be minimal? (I have not yet bought the jbod box, so I cannot run a comparison).

 

Thanks

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Pafegori,

 

Performance is always a concern for us.  We want everything to be as fast as possible, and to use as few other libraries/APIs/dependancies as possible (as these can slow things down).

 

 

However, as for the encryption that StableBit CloudDrive does, we rely on the Windows "CNG" encryption API. So this occurs at the kernel level, meaning that it should be VERY, VERY fast.  Additionally, because we're doing this at the kernel level, that means that the data is encrypted as hits the drive, and the cached storage is encrypted as well. 

 

 

 

 

Additionally, depending on how you want to do things.... you could pool your disks, and then create a CloudDrive on the pool using the local provider. This may make things slightly less complicated.  And you can reset the CloudDrive volume in StableBit CloudDrive's UI when you add more disks.

 

However, this doesn't get you the same level of control over duplication and file placement. However, if you're duplicating the entire pool, and you don't care about file placement, then this may be a better choice. 

 

 

 

 

 

Though, just as a caveat here, depending on the RAID controller in use, you're likely not going to see the same level of performance in StableBit DrivePool as you would in a RAID array. Though this depends on a lot of factors (for instance, my pool maxes out my gigabit connection regularly for reads and writes, with no SSDs).