If the only thing that you need to know is that "the data is probably different," and you expect that if it is different it will be very different, then a simple CRC-32 or CRC-64 digest is often enough. It is extremely fast. See preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision-probabilities/

In reply to Re: Could SHA encode faster than MD5? by Anonymous Monk
in thread Could SHA encode faster than MD5? by bbs2web

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