Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's SSD/hard drive?

#1

Post by aw1621107 » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

I'm about to wipe and reinstall the SSD on my mac after replacing its logic board, and I'm wondering if encrypting the drive is worth it. I spent maybe a year with an encrypted APFS drive before the logic board died, and don't think I really noticed much of a difference in performance during daily use (although I admittedly didn't run any benchmarks, nor did I have an equivalent system to compare against).

Is there an advantage/disadvantage to encrypting the drive versus, say, using a strong login password? Should I expect a significant performance hit if I do end up encrypting the drive?

Right now I'm just using the laptop for office work, but I plan on heading back to school in the near term and probably should worry about theft.

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's SSD/hard drive?

#2

Post by kojeovo » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

Yeah, do it. I just use Filevault. You wont notice any performance loss and the gain is huge.

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's SSD/hard drive?

#3

Post by aw1621107 » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

kojeovo wrote: post #2

Yeah, do it. I just use Filevault. You wont notice any performance loss and the gain is huge.

Is there a functional difference between FileVault and encrypted APFS?

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's SSD/hard drive?

#4

Post by ocdtrekkie » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

Yes, I encrypt my laptop drives. Laptops are incredibly likely to get left behind somewhere or stolen, so it's super critical to make sure you aren't keeping the sole copy of important data on it and that the data that is on it is encrypted.

Performance impact is pretty negligible on an SSD with most modern operating systems.

EDIT: Another thing to be aware of, built-in hardware encryption on a drive is not necessarily adequate, and some encryption schemes will default to just using the hard drive's own encryption if available (such as BitLocker): https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/ad...

You want to make sure you're using software encryption from your OS.

Re: Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's SSD/hard drive?

#5

Post by rexpi0 » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

aw1621107 wrote: post #3

kojeovo wrote: post #2

Yeah, do it. I just use Filevault. You wont notice any performance loss and the gain is huge.

Is there a functional difference between FileVault and encrypted APFS?

Short answer - no functional difference between encrypted APFS and FileVault. https://www.blackbagtech.com/blog/2018/04/02/ask-expert-apfs...