I'm about to wipe and reinstall the SSD on my mac after replacing its logic board, and I'm wondering if encrypting the drive is worth it. I spent maybe a year with an encrypted APFS drive before the logic board died, and don't think I really noticed much of a difference in performance during daily use (although I admittedly didn't run any benchmarks, nor did I have an equivalent system to compare against).
Is there an advantage/disadvantage to encrypting the drive versus, say, using a strong login password? Should I expect a significant performance hit if I do end up encrypting the drive?
Right now I'm just using the laptop for office work, but I plan on heading back to school in the near term and probably should worry about theft.
Performance impact is pretty negligible on an SSD with most modern operating systems.
EDIT: Another thing to be aware of, built-in hardware encryption on a drive is not necessarily adequate, and some encryption schemes will default to just using the hard drive's own encryption if available (such as BitLocker): https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/ad...
You want to make sure you're using software encryption from your OS.