• Watch out: Microsoft used to let Bitlocker detect hardware encryption capabilities on SSDs and enabling Bitlocker used to be as simple as enabling hardware drive encryption.

    Then it turned out hardware drive encryption was trash and insecure as hell. Microsoft removed hardware encryption from Bitlocker because in many cases you didn’t need the key to decrypt the data or there was a manufacturer set default master password.

    Don’t trust hardware encryption, use software encryption instead.

    As for the performance impact, I’m a little surprised by these numbers. AES acceleration allows for tens of gigabytes per second of throughput on modern chips, I wonder what’s happening here. There has always been a performance gap between encrypted and unencrypted, but I thought that only really hurt writes, and no more than a few percent.