Bitlocker on new SSD

Hi

I know when I enable bitlocker on a brand new SSD, I can choose to only encrypt the used portion of the drive. As the drive is basically empty, that will be almost instantaneous.

Other option is to encrypt the entire drive, which I believe will take a lot longer even though the drive is empty, as it will be encrypting the empty blocks (if that's the right word).

My question is... will encrypting the entire empty drive mean that adding data to it in the future will be faster, as the entire drive has already been encrypted?

Or does the new data need to be encrypted as it's added (regardless of whether the empty blocks it's using have already been encrypted) so will take the same amount of time anyway?

I.e. is there any benefit in encrypting an entire brand new drive (I appreciate the benefit if it's previously had data on it that's been deleted, but that's not relevant with a brand new drive)?

Thanks

 

Encryption should be left for NSA or Sensitive Client files only(Data Privacy). If your not doing these types of work it's not worth doing and worse you will forget the passcode or not write it down correctly and get locked out instead. For everyday users No, it's not worth the hassle. Just use a password on the main computer and that will more then stop users from using it without your permission and if someone is using because you didn't secure it or stop them from using it then there is nothing more anyone here can do to help.

 

Without BitLocker, or any other disk encryption, if you have physical access its as easy as live booting with linux...
Lots of drives already do encryption on the fly on the drive hardware, so it doesn't make them any slower..

 

No.

Yes. It will be encrypted instantly though, the encryption overhead is pretty much non-existant.

No.

 

Thanks for answering my questions. I ended up encrypting the whole drive anyway. Only took about an hour or so - not too bad for a 2TB external SSD. My 4TB external HDD took about 3 days!

 

Remember This - you will need to enter this if you reformat or when moved to different system will require the original O/S to remove encryption before access. And if your Computer dies or drive crashes this is when encryption does nothing good for recovery on a different computer.

 

If the drive is truly new then there isn't a need to encrypt the full thing, but it's also fast enough to usually not matter as you've already discovered.

Note, however, that if the drive is not new then you probably want to encrypt the whole thing. For example, if you have been using the drive, just reformatted it and reinstalled the OS, then you ought to encrypt the whole thing: what the OS considers unused space will still be contain data from before you reformatted that can be read back by any low-level tools.

Yes you need to keep track of the key. Increased security almost always carries some increase in hassle. Whether that's worth it to you depends on your data and your own ability to not lose a key.