> Some of it may be progress for progress' sake, but try running a machine with full-disk encryption on a Core 2 Duo, without the AES engine - the new hardware

> Some of it may be progress for progress' sake, but try running a machine with full-disk encryption on a Core 2 Duo, without the AES engine - the new hardware makes a lot of difference. I have been running full-disk encryption on my Linux boxes since 2003, and the performance hit has never been significant. With an old computer, the most important thing to do with your hard disk is replacing an old hard disk with an SSD. That alone will significantly boost performance, and compared to that, encryption isn’t a significant factor.