Benchmarking The Performance Cost To Full Disk Encryption For Modern AMD Ryzen Laptops

With the new AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Zen 4 mobile processor powering the likes of the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4, I was curious about the performance impact of employing full disk encryption. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost to enabling full disk encryption versus not utilizing any disk encryption while running Fedora Workstation on the new ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD laptop.

For the past decade and a half I've been looking at the Linux disk encryption performance in varying configurations from eCryptfs to LUKS full disk encryption and more. I certainly recommend anyone with sensitive information on production systems -- especially laptops -- leverage full disk encryption offered by most modern Linux distribution installers. While I routinely look at the performance difference, I haven't done so in a while and thus was curious to see what difference it made with a modern Linux distribution and on the very latest hardware.

For today's testing it was using Fedora Workstation 38 with the Linux 6.5 kernel using the available full disk encryption versus no encryption. Both times using the default Btrfs file-system option of Fedora Workstation. All tests were done on the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD with the Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U (Zen 4) with a 1TB Kioxia KXG8AZNV1T02 LA NVMe solid-state drive.

These benchmarks are being done primarily for curiosity sake on my end and provided on a reference basis for those curious about the performance impact as well.