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by SulfurHexaFluri 1966 days ago
What is even the point of encrypted drives over just using filesystem encryption managed by the OS? I'm guessing some minor portability benefit across OSs but is this really worth trusting the OEM over?
2 comments

There is no truly portable FS encryption managed by OS. I've not seen OS encryption which will allow mount the same drive e. g. in Windows and in FreeBSD. Or even to connect an encrypted drive to a Smart TV (which likely is Linux bused, but would not allow to install unsigned firmware).
Performance
This is a USB hard drive though. Even a cheap laptop can encrypt data faster than you can transfer over USB.

Maybe I might understand if this was some kind of server SSD but even then im not sure it would make sense.

That is true today. It hasn't always been true.

In fact Microsoft's own BitLocker dropped reliance on hardware encryption to workaround this same problem. And now that the performance impact is minimal it makes sense to default to software.