SSD drives are used a lot by gamers on Windows PCs and at least some reading this are using Windows 11 on their computers. Here is something to check that could be negatively impacting your SSD performance in Windows 11.
Good Old Microsoft bugging us to upgrade to Windows 11 and once we do, they turn on Bitlocker to encrypt the SSD drive by default reducing performance. The following article goes through how to check if you have BitLocker enabled on your Windows 11 computer and to disable with a single line command: Default Windows 11 feature slows SSDs by up to 45%. Here’s how to fix it:
Windows 11’s developers are to blame for the problem, because actually many SSDs now support hardware-based encryption, in which all decryption and encryption processes are handled directly by the SSDs. Windows 11 Pro nevertheless activates BitLocker’s software-based encryption during installation without giving the user the possibility to prevent it.
Microsoft probably decided to do this because it does not have full control over the code for hardware-based encryption, as that’s managed by the SSD manufacturers. A few years ago, there were incidents where vulnerabilities were discovered in hardware encryption code that had to be fixed by the manufacturers. So Microsoft seems to prefer to rely on its own solution here.
Just in case the linked article goes offline, here is the command line instruction to check if BitLocker is enabled on your computer:
manage-bde -status
To turn off encryption use the following command line with administrator rights:
manage-bde -off C:
Per the article: “The “C:” must be replaced by the drive letter of the encrypted drive if necessary. After restarting your computer, the change becomes active immediately.”