File Share Encryption

hi, i have been running PGP for a few years but have continued negative feedback from users that complain about the speed of their machines.  i only use this app to perform Whole Disc Encryption of the C: drive on laptops.  

what can we do to improve the performance and boot times overall?  

thanks for any advice.

Any encypted solution will slow down machines to some degree.  If a laptop is slow already and you encrypted it, its going to be slower.  

This sort of scenario is how to manage end-users expectations rather than gauging and actual slowdown

Follow the best practices prior to installation & install latest version of PGP WDE. 

end-user expectations are to have a machine that isn't twice as slow after the software is installed.  i have tested the newest version so we'll see if that helps at all.  

where are the best practices?

thanks for the replies!

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH149543

Standard user experience amounts to about a 2.5-5% performance degradation on a machine that is PGP WDE encrypted. If you manage the server, you can try AES 128-bit encryption instead of 256-bit which does add some additional performance benefit at the cost of crypto strength.

The major painpoint for customers today is modern hardware with large disks and resuming from Hibernation. you can see 2-3 times the bootup time when resuming from hibernation due to limitations with the PGP WDE mini kernel that we boot which is operating in a 16-bit mode.  This is even more noticable on a modern system with quad-core and eight-core processors with 16 gig's of ram since they are used to the system booting very quickly and when it's running in this 16-bit mode it's much slower.

We did make some code improvements to the behavior with hibernation in regards to failure in resuming hibernation (specifically hybrid sleep mode) in 10.2.1 MP5 (generally available through FileConnect). But no performance improvements as of yet. I'm willing to bet, where end users complaining the most - it's due to this limitation with hibernation.

In summary:

- don't use hibernation (2 to 3x better bootup times)

- try using aes 128bit instead of 256 bit

Docs for reference:

Blog on AES-128bit vs AES-256 bit
http://lukenotricks.blogspot.com/2010/04/aes-128-versus-aes-256-encryption.html

HOW TO: Enable AES-128 for PGP WDE in a PGP Universal Server 2.12 Environment

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH149717

Feature Request: Hibernation significantly slower after installing PGP

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH184961

Did any of the suggestions help?

By the way, if you are using McAfee for your AV. I might also suggest disabling the HIPS policy settings. We have had to work around the way McAfee HIPS interacts with PGP and the Windows Registry. So I would test this with the latest client version today Symantec Encryption Desktop 10.3.0 MP1 and also possibly try disabling McAfee HIPS as well.