I have just recently started looking at encypting my linux disto. All of the advice that I have seen so far is to use LUKS to do that. While researching the subject, I stumbled across and article on the Arch Wiki that talked about SED’s (Self Encrypting Drives). The jist of it is that the drives have built in encryption that is always turned on, but unlocked by default. So in theory, if you have one of these drives you can either turn on the encryption via the BIOS or via a package called sedutil.
But, checking various distros, the only places I found it was Arch AUR, and Fedora. So that leads me to believe that it isn’t that main stream, and not many people use it.
Does anyone have any experience with it and is it worth exploring instead of using LUKS?
I use LUKS, personally, and like how when I format a disk of some kind in Gnome Disks utility, it allows choosing LUKS as an option, and setting a decryption password.
GUI integration goes a very long way to helping these encryption tools reach the masses.
Yes, I am with you on that, I too totally prefer using a GUI vs command line.
Based on the lack of responses, it seems that for the people that have a SED device that they are not using the built in encryption, but using LUKS instead.
I generally don’t like the thought of having to rely on hardware/firmware implementations. I want RAID and encryption to be software so it is more universal and not dependent on any one manufacturer/model/firmware.