
Ask HN: Do you encrypt your laptop's SSD/hard drive? - aw1621107
I&#x27;m about to wipe and reinstall the SSD on my mac after replacing its logic board, and I&#x27;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&#x27;t think I really noticed much of a difference in performance during daily use (although I admittedly didn&#x27;t run any benchmarks, nor did I have an equivalent system to compare against).<p>Is there an advantage&#x2F;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?<p>Right now I&#x27;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.
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ocdtrekkie
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...](https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-
guidance/advisory/ADV180028)

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

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

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aw1621107
Is there a functional difference between FileVault and encrypted APFS?

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rexpi0
Short answer - no functional difference between encrypted APFS and FileVault.
[https://www.blackbagtech.com/blog/2018/04/02/ask-expert-
apfs...](https://www.blackbagtech.com/blog/2018/04/02/ask-expert-apfs-
encryption/)

