For anyone storing personal information on their laptops especially, I definitely recommend making use of Linux LUKS-based full disk encryption capabilities. I’ve been recommending going with the full disk encryption capabilities for nearly two decades to help protect personal data in case your laptop is lost or stolen. The performance implications of using full disk encryption have went down over time and in most real-world workloads you’ll see minimal to any difference out of it. As it’s been a while since running any reference benchmarks looking at no disk encryption to full disk encryption, here are some results on the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 paired with the Framework Laptop 13 powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point”.
For many years now the Ubuntu desktop install has supported setting up full disk encryption as part of the installation process. It’s easy to do and I highly encourage it for any production personal or work laptops that may be carrying sensitive data. With this article is looking at the performance difference of using Ubuntu 25.04 without any disk encryption to employing that full disk encryption.
A mix of real-world and synthetic storage benchmarks were used for reference in looking at the modern 2025 impact of utilizing full disk encryption on Linux. Plus various sensor metrics were also monitored for looking at any indirect costs to full disk encryption.
The same Framework Laptop 13 was used throughout all of the testing with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (Zen 5) SoC, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory, and 1TB WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD. A clean install of Ubuntu 25.04 was used each time with the stock Linux 6.14 kernel and EXT4 file-system.
