Practically all 'password protection' methods that are in use today will involve encryption, as that's the only method that is not absolutely trivial to bypass. It's just voluntarily enforced, after all.)Īt software level, there is no disk-level nor filesystem-level password feature built in to Windows nor Linux. (Besides that, data recovery companies have been able to bypass the ATA password for a very long time. You will not get a password prompt when connecting an 'ATA password' locked disk to either OS the disk will just refuse all I/O, and might hang the system for a short while. most SATA HDDs can have an 'ATA password' applied – but neither Windows nor Linux know how to deal with it. Password protection can be done at hardware level (that is, enforced by the disk's firmware) – e.g. If your goal is to avoid encryption for other reasons unrelated to performance – there is probably no such thing that actually works well.

VeraCrypt works on both systems and supports both full-disk and container encryption, but has to be installed separately. The same applies even if using 'containers' (encrypted disk images like VeraCrypt provides), as they're treated like virtual disks and not as archives. Microsoft BitLocker is supported on Linux, but the standard cryptsetup tools only gained support just a month ago, so for now you'll still need some additional tools (either Dislocker or libbde). It works at sector level and is almost completely invisible – sectors are encrypted or decrypted on the fly, so there are no separate archiving/extraction steps necessary. If your goal is performance, use full-disk encryption.

External drive password protection