[clug] how long to encrypt a 1T exernal disk using LUKS

[steve jenkin]

jhock wrote on 28/06/10 8:35 AM:
> Hi,
> 
> I have an eeepc 10HD with Ubuntu 10.0 and Western Digital 1 terabyte
> external hard disk. I started encrypting the WD disk yesterday using
> gdecrypt and luks. Does anyone know how long this could take. It is
> still encrypting this morning. So far top tells me the kcrypt command
> has been running for "1075:00". I expect that it minutes.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help.
> 
> John
> 

A useful benchmark for crypto performance is ssh/scp.
[Which is RSA/DSA to start, then uses lighter symmetric keys, IIRC]

I've rarely seen anything that pushes 100Mbps (~10MB/s).

Without evidence/knowledge, I'm going to guess the Atom does crypto like
a SPARC 300Mhz: ~10Mbps (1MB/sec == 3.5Gb/hour == 200-300 Hrs/Tb)

Lets hope not...

BTW, my Mac-mini took around 30 hrs to initialise a 1Tb USB disk (WD).
Only does ~20MB/sec, which surprised me.

regards
steve

-- 
Steve Jenkin, Info Tech, Systems and Design Specialist.
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