How would enabling FileVault alter my system and TM performance?

What are the pros and cons, performance-wise, of enabling and using FileVault? Is there any at all, or does it slow a computer down significantly or on the contrary speed it up? Also, what effect will it have on Time Machine-backups (performance-wise)?

(I'm assuming you are referring to FileVault 2 found in OS X Lion)

The folks at AnandTech have run some performance benchmarks on the new FileVault. Quote:

... [described are several I/O tests with and without FileVault enabled, including some charts you might want to have a look at] ...

Overall the hit on pure I/O performance is in the 20 - 30% range. It's noticeable but not big enough to outweigh the benefits of full disk encryption. [...]

[emphasis above is mine]

So to answer your question:

• FileVault slows I/O down, and it is a measurable decrease in performance. However, I agree with the earlier quoted statement – in that the added security is beneficial, and I use FileVault on my Macbook Air.

• The answer on the second question is "it depends". The TimeMachine backup process must certainly read a lot of data from the FileVault-encrypted disk, so the reading portion of the backup will be slower.

  However, whether or not the overall backup performance suffers considerably depends on where the bottleneck is in the system – e.g. is it a very fast backup drive, or a very slow backup drive? Is it connected by USB (slower), or Thunderbolt (faster)? If the write speed is terrible, that will govern the overall speed of the backup, not so much the read speed having been reduced a bit. Ergo, it depends.

CPU load

Filevault 2 supports Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). It's important to know if your Mac has an Intel processor which supports this, as it significantly reduces the CPU overhead. Search for you CPU here an look if is supports the New AES instructions.

My Macbook Pro 2011 got this feature enabled via a firmware update (Apple did not enable this with the newly shipped MBP). With AES encryption acceleration, the performance drop with Filevault 2 enabled is almost unnoticeable during normal usage. The maximum read speeds of my SSD only dropped from 510MB/s to 490MB/s.

Ars Technica, published an extended review on Filvault 2 in Lion. They say:

Apple also leverages the special-purpose AES instructions and hardware on Intel's newest CPUs, further reducing the CPU overhead. The end result is that regular users will be hard-pressed to notice any reduction in performance with encryption enabled.

As the overall CPU load is nearly unchanged, the battery life is not affected significantly.

Time Machine Backups

If you backup up wirelessly (unencrypted) or locally (encrypted, USB) the performance of Time Machine will not be affected significantly.

• First, because the of the AES acceleration mentioned earlier.
• Secondly because Time Machine creates local backups (snapshots). OS X Lion compensates for the potentially unavailable external disk by keeping an additional backup locally on the primary hard drive. This has its obvious advantages, since you can restore to past Time Machine backups right away from anywhere.

I've been using Filevault 2 encryption on a MBP 8,2 for three months.