Linux Full Disk Encryption Performance With AMD Ryzen 5 + SATA 3.0 SSD

Sequential reads dropped from 360 MB/s to 294 MB/s on the Ryzen 5 when full disk encryption was used.

There was a modest impact as well in the performance of FS-Mark.

Here's a look at the CPU utilization over the course of all the benchmarks run. During some of the benchmarks there was a noticeable difference in CPU utilization with/without full disk encryption, but overall not that much of a difference. When factoring all the data points, a stock Fedora 26 install on the Ryzen 5 1400 had an average CPU usage of 26.3% and a peak of 38.48% for these disk-focused tests. When full-disk encryption was happening with Fedora 26, the average CPU use was 28.6% with a peak of 39%.

So while there is still a measurable performance impact when using Linux full-disk encryption with an AMD Ryzen CPU and SATA 3.0 SSD, the performance overall is still very good and would be also much less noticeable if using an NVMe SSD. But even still, I highly recommend full disk encryption be used by all production desktops/laptops where data security is even half important.