First introduced with Windows Vista in 2006, BitLocker has long been Microsoft's in-house solution for managing fully encrypted partitions and storage drives. Although it is an important security tool, it is also known for a few controversial reliability issues and, above all, for the drop in PC performance that comes with turning it on. Now the Redmond software giant is setting out to fix all of these problems at once, with one prerequisite: users must be willing to upgrade to a new generation of PC hardware.
Removing the bottleneck on high-speed NVMe drives
According to the latest information, Microsoft will soon begin "accelerating" input/output (I/O) operations for BitLocker-encrypted drives on personal computers (PCs) with compatible hardware components. The company first unveiled this landmark change at the Ignite conference last month, and it has now shared more key technical details about how hardware-accelerated encryption will actually work in practice.
According to Rafal Sosnowski, a specialist at Microsoft, hardware-accelerated BitLocker solutions are designed to deliver a significant improvement in both performance and security for encrypted setups. The technology is said to fully address the problems that arise with the latest Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage technology. Modern NVMe drives can reach far higher I/O performance than previous generations, and this inadvertently puts heavy pressure on the older encryption system.
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Specifically, a modern NVMe SSD can move a huge amount of data and files at extremely high speed. As a result, BitLocker's encryption algorithms must consume a large number of CPU processing cycles to keep up. Sosnowski said that, if not properly optimized, this additional performance overhead can become a serious problem in certain applications. The computer becomes sluggish because the CPU is busy handling encryption instead of running applications.
Microsoft listed professional tasks such as editing video on large clip files, compiling developers' huge codebases, and especially gaming as storage scenarios that can be hit hard by this hidden computational burden. Hardware acceleration is said to help BitLocker minimize the performance impact by shifting most encryption operations from the main CPU to a dedicated "crypto engine" inside the system on a chip (SoC). In addition, the feature will protect encryption keys from prying eyes outside the system through a proper hardware wrapping process.
Impressive performance and the hardware requirements that come with it
On the software side, the components of the BitLocker acceleration feature are already available in Windows 11, starting with the September 2025 update (version 24H2) and Windows 11 25H2. For now, however, the feature is supported only on Intel vPro systems based on the upcoming Core Ultra Series 3 processors. Even so, Microsoft is also considering extending support to other processor vendors and platforms in the near future to make the technology more widely available.
Microsoft explains that by offloading encryption operations to a dedicated SoC component, BitLocker can achieve truly remarkable performance improvements. A drive using hardware-accelerated BitLocker is said to be just as fast as an NVMe drive that does not use BitLocker encryption. Meanwhile, the number of CPU cycles needed to manage I/O is many times lower than with the traditional software-based encryption approach.
The company also notes, however, that customers interested in hardware-accelerated encryption must meet a few specific prerequisites. The feature will work only when drives are encrypted with the XTS-AES-256 algorithm. Other algorithms supported by the SoC vendor will be added in the future. In addition, in enterprise environments, information technology (IT) administrators can proactively customize or disable the feature through specific management policies to make sure it fits the organization's infrastructure.
