Performance Comparison Analysis of Digital Forensic Tools in Various Operating Systems

It is known that experts widely use digital forensics tools, in order to investigate criminal cases. The main scope of this research is considered as the performance comparison of digital forensic tools in various Operating Systems, such as “Windows 10”, “Windows 11”, “Ubuntu”, and “Windowsfx”. This is done for optimization reasons and more specifically for the minimization of processing time in forensic data analysis. The research was divided into two main parts by using exactly the same hardware as well as the default Operating Systems' configuration. The first part presents the performance comparison of the above Operating Systems by using two benchmarking tools such as “Phoronix Test Suite” and “Indigobench”. The second part focuses on the performance measurements of the corresponding digital forensic tools “FTK Imager”, “Photorec”, “Quickhash” and “Peautils”. It should be noted that every tool is tested ten times in order to increase the accuracy of the averaged total execution time of every iteration. The results indicate that the “Windowsfx” Operating System has the best overall performance after exhausting research of testing all the aforementioned tools.