Do you use hard drive encryption?

[freebooter]

I am thinking of getting a new nvme drive for os and general use. Looking at reviews one feature that not all drives have is hardware encryption. I have never encrypted my windows pc but do encrypt my linux pcs. From what I understand hardware encryption should have less overhead and hence be quicker. Many drives either from 'lesser' brands or lower ranges don't have it and some drives that claim to have it don't actually work with bitlocker.

I was wondering how many people use encryption for home use? If so do you insist on hardware support or just use software encryption?

 

[freebooter]

Thanks for the replies. As I said in the op I am looking at getting a new drive and was wondering whether it was worth paying extra for one with hardware encryption. Nobody has mentioned hardware encryption so I am assuming those that are using bitlocker are just using the default software solution.

I have looked into it a bit more and found an article from Tom's Hardware claiming up to 45% loss of performance using software bitlocker. It seems a bit of a waste to buy fast drives and then lose so much. The hardware encryption had virtually no performance loss by comparison.

However, it seems there are some concerns over the security of the hardware implementation in many drives even from top end manufacturers. Probably for this reason MS defaults to software encryption and it is quite convoluted to enable hardware encryption instead.

I use encrypted file containers rather than entire hard drive encryption.. mainly for client files and databases..

I am wondering whether to go this route. It is my home pc that I am considering and it is used mainly for gaming. The only risk to it is if it got stolen in a burglary. There would only be a few personal files that I would be bothered about some getting access to. The other issue may be browser data and files, saved passwords etc. I don't know how secure those are. A bit of care and using manually encrypted folders may be good enough and preserve the drive performance.

What do you use to encrypt folders? I see windows has the ability to encrypt individual folders easily.

 

[freebooter]

I now have my new drive and I am trying to finalise issues before reinstalling.

From what I have read hardware encryption doesn't work natively with windows on nvme drives and it isn't considered to be as secure as it should be. This is a shame as all the reviews show it having virtually no slowdown.

Software drive encryption via windows cause a significant slowdown in performance but is now default on new windows installs.

As I said, the only thing I would be concerned about would be browser data but I suspect I will just go with whatever windows does as default when I install it which looks now to be software encrypted.

 

[freebooter]

It looks like it isn't a decision we will have to make in the future as MS has made encryption the default from 24H2 onwards. There is probably a way around that but it means that going forward windows installs will almost all be encrypted and software developers will be writing for that environment.

I haven't reinstalled yet so I haven't decided whether to bother to disable it or just to go with the flow and let windows use its default settings.