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

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.