MacBook Air SSD Benchmarks: 2010 vs 2011 vs Lion Encryption
My personal take from the numbers is that Lion FileVault comes at a large performance hit on Core 2 Duo machines w/Toshiba drives; a performance hit that I would personally find unacceptable. Inversely, the performance hit on a Core i7 machine w/Samsung drive is 3x less drastic, and thus, for me, well worth it.
Another way of looking at it is that the encrypted, slower SSD on the slower MacBook Air is still way faster than any notebook hard drive.
