None of my current computers is powerful enough for that without it being a serious hassle. And I'm pretty sure it will drain my laptop battery much faster...
It looks like many people assume this to be so but haven't done the benchmarks. FDE is going to be a much smaller hit than say anti-virus software. Encryption routines have been highly optimized into the multi gigabytes per second range.
> FDE is going to be a much smaller hit than say anti-virus software.
But I don't run any anti-virus, this is even one of the good reasons why I stopped using windows aeons ago. I tried LUKS with AES a few years ago, and though the performance was good it comes with a really significant hit.
I'm running Linux everywhere, and Snow Leopard on my MacBook. I find the MacBook a bit slow at time (mostly because of the 2GB RAM I guess). I still use an ancient Athlon64 single core with 1GB as my main desktop, though :)
I have tested Windows 7 with both Bitlocker and Truecrypt, and Arch Linux with with LUKS, on my four year old Dell e520 (a 1.8ghz Core 2 Duo 6300 PC with 4GB of RAM). I didn't notice any real performance difference with FDE enabled, although I am sure a proper benchmark tool would have shown something.
