Benchmarks show effect of device encryption on Nexus 6 performance

Nexus devices shipping with Lollipop have full device encryption turned on by default. That’s great from a privacy point of view, but the downside is encryption takes its toll on performance, as benchmarks from AnandTech and direct observations show.

Background


A bit of background: Google has first included the ability to fully encrypt a device on Honeycomb. But that was optional, and most users weren’t even aware of it. However, following the NSA revelations and the growing public awareness of digital privacy issues, Google decided to enable device encryption by default on devices shipping with Lollipop.

Starting with Lollipop, all the data on the device is encrypted by default (with a default password when no password is set, and using the user’s PIN/password/patterns when those are set.) This means the processor must do a bit of extra work each time data is written (encrypted) or read from storage (decrypted).

According to benchmarks ran by AnandTech’s Brandon Chester and Joshua Ho the impact of all those cryptographic operations is quite significant. The two ran a benchmark called AndEBench, that is designed to test storage read/write performance, on the Nexus 6 with encryption on (default state), on a modified Nexus 6 with encryption off, as well as on Nexus 5 with encryption on and off.