Encrypt SSD or not?

Posted by JamesBradbury on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by JamesBradbury
Published on 2012-09-13T08:08:08Z Indexed on 2012/09/13 9:50 UTC
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Filed under:

dual-boot

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encryption

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ssd

My desktop machine is running Ubuntu 12.04 (and will probably stay with it until the next LTS). I've got a new 120GB SSD on the way as my existing 420GB spinning disk. If it makes any difference I'll be dual-booting with Windows 7 across both disks too.

I've read some helpful answers here about /home setup and enabling TRIM, which I intend to follow. So most of my /home will be on the SSD, with only photos, videos and music on the spinning disk.

The question is, when I reinstall Ubuntu from CD or USB, whether I should encrypt the SSD?

Specifically:

I'm reading that drive wear isn't much of an issue with modern SSDs as they last decades even if you spam them. Is this true?
How big a performance reduction will encrypting cause (I have an i7 Sandybridge, so I guess it can cope)?
Is it more important from a security point of view to encrypt an SSD? I think I read somewhere that it may be hard to reliably wipe data.

By all means answer even if you only know about one of those things.

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