Example:
You have an existing 40 gigabyte file
It happened to compress well
You delete it and your free disk space goes up by 4 gigabytes.
You then write a new 40 gigabyte file that doesn’t compress well
Replacing an existing file of the same size just ate an extra 36 gigabytes.
How would you plan around that? SSDs should store the bytes given and don’t play fancy games.
Given that, it's good sense to compress if at all possible simply to make the drive live longer.
And guess what - I just googled, tons of hits, and this has been done for a long time :)
So it makes sense, is done, and is important for modern SSD behavior.
I'm surprised (and shocked) that letting unencrypted data hit the disk is still common enough to make such optimizations worth it.
Even if you just stick the key in the server's TPM without any sealing, an encrypted disk makes it much easier to deal with e.g. drive returns (for warranty or fault analysis) or disposal.
Bitlocker supports on drive hardware encryption, and I'd be surprised if other major file systems didn't.
If I recall, it's a FIPS requirement for data at rest now.
Because the storage hardware might be loyal to someone who is not the owner of the data.
Because the hardware cannot be trusted to do it correctly. IIRC Bitlocker stopped relying on it for this reason.
https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/you-cant-trust-bitlocker-to-en... (see the updates)
There's very, very little benefit in encrypting data at a filesystem level in a datacenter if you think about it.
And unfortunately compression and encryption are seemingly at odds fundamentally :c
"Even if you just stick the key in the server's TPM without any sealing, an encrypted disk makes it much easier to deal with e.g. drive returns (for warranty or fault analysis) or disposal."
Would you resell usable drives that you no longer want to use (e.g. because they're too small or your needs changed more towards SSDs) if unencrypted data was written to them at some point?
How much effort would you put into making sure that no broken drive that can't be wiped leaves the datacenter without shredding?
Any process you put in place will have gaps - e.g. through human error or malicious acts - and this provides pretty solid protection against that.
>Data compression via encoding algorithms enables a solid state drive (SSD) to write less data, which in turn yields higher write bandwidth. With a significant amount of data being compressible, performance benefits can be substantial.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
Adding life to SSDs is a terribly useful feature