Does anyone here have experience with full-disk encryption?

I'm getting a new laptop, and I'm planning on trying to make it nice and secure from the get-go (no internet until I get a VPN, full-disk encryption from the start).


I'm curious how much of a performance drop it would cause. The laptop in question will have:

• An Intel Core i7-4700HQ 2.4 GHz (I think it overclocks to ~3.0-3.4GHz)

• 16 Gig RAM

• Windows 8.1 pre-installed (Should I do a fresh install before encrypting?)

• And a 5400 rpm HDD (I believe it can be upgraded later on though, if necessary)

How noticeable might the drop be? Right now I don't think I'll be doing to much PC gaming, but how much might it affect games if I do decide to?


I'm probably going to be using Bitlocker or VeraCrypt (still doing my research), but I'd be grateful for any suggestions or advice as I'm quite new to both hardware and encryption.

I can't say I have experience with full-disk but I do use a laptop running Ubuntu linux and an encrypted home folder. Seems to be a negligible difference and from what I've read after googling there shouldn't be any major slowdown with full-disk either. I should also mention that my encrypted swap space got screwed up somehow and I resorted to leaving that unencrypted.

But before that you should ask yourself if you really need that level of security. I guess it really depends on how paranoid you are. If you're just an average person you may not need this kind of security. If you have some seriously important data on your system and you're worried that your drive may be stolen, you should be aware that you're still vulnerable to cold boot attacks. In any event if you don't need full-disk, it should be sufficient to just encrypt your files.