Performance with an encrypted disk

Question

Is Raspberry Pi (model B, rev. 2) suitable for a home file server with external disks encrypted with LUKS? In particular, is the de/encryption throughput reasonable? I used to have such a disk in a dual core Atom machine and the performance was OK (mostly bound by network throughput and the CIFS protocol). Using Pi would be somewhat nicer - less power consumption, no noise from the power supply etc.

With 100Mbit ethernet I'd be more than happy if the throughput were somewhere between 5-10MB/s. And > 1MB/s would still be reasonable for most operations.

Answer 1

So I tried that out and it works pretty nicely so far (except for some problems with the 4.1.18 kernel). Using cipher aes-xts-plain64 the speed is around 3MB/s for both reading and writing.

Answer 2

Other SOCs in the same price range have much better encryption performance:

aes-xts 512b benchmarks:

MiB/s,   Product
   9.7,  RPI 1
  18.8,  HiFive Unmatched (U740)
  22.5,  RPI 3
  42.2,  Odroid C2
  60.0,  USB2 ===
  66.1,  RPI 4
  76.2,  Odroid XU4
 221.2,  UP1
 240.3,  Orange Pi PC2, NanoPi NEO2 (AllWinner H5)
 267.0,  espressobin
 370.5,  ROCK64 (RK3328)
 570.6,  Odroid C4 (S905X3)
 625.0,  USB3 ===
 655.6,  Odroid N1, ROCKPRO64, etc (RK3399)
 666.1,  UP2 (N4200)
 704.2,  Odroid H2 (J4105)
 707.1,  Odroid N2 (S922X)
 826.1,  rackspace (E5-2670)
 985.1,  EC2 (AMD EPYC 7571)
1366.7,  EC2 (E5-2676)
1393.7,  old i5 (2500S)
2710.3,  Ryzen 1800X
2994.5,  i7-1165G7

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=149&t=30103