Hi everybody,
simple but important question:
If I activate Windows Bitlocker on my drives, will it slow down the usage of Cubase?
Thanks in advance
Short answer: Yes.
Slightly longer answer:
Depends on where you keep your projects and libraries. If the main application is on the bit lockered drive and projects and libraries on a separate drive for example, the it’s less of a hit. (Pretty obvious really).
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It depends a lot on the project and plugins you are using. If you’re using MIDI tracks and synth plugins (rather than sampling plugins) then it’s probably not going to touch the disk much. If you use sampling plugins and the samples are installed on a non-bitlocker drive then it shouldn’t be affected. If you use audio tracks and they are on a bitlocker volume then it might slow down performance slightly.
However, if you have a fast processor and fast disk then I suspect you won’t notice any difference. From some of the raw stats I’ve seen, read performance is slightly reduced but write performance is affected more. In practice, that’s probably not going to affect Cubase performance unless you are recording multiple tracks at once
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I would also think that while it will surely be measurable in synthetic tests, in real life use there will be no noticeable difference, even when recording multiple tracks at once. Audio at common sample rates is still not really that much data all in all.
And having your sample libraries and project data on a separate disks (that you can chose not to encrypt) is a good practice anyway.
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I have Bitlocker activated on all my SSD drives, internal and external, and I see or feel no real impact. Together with modern CPUs you might be able to see a difference in test environements, as @fese writes, but in real life it is ignorable.
Don’t enable it if you still have HDDs somewhere in use, that really makes a difference.
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