If "things go catastrophic" your hard drive is not usable at all anymore. At the very least some files can't be recovered at all. So you need backups in any case. Once you have backups, you might as well encrypt your hard drives, especially if you store these in different locations (which you should).

An advantage of encryption is that it makes it easier to give away or resell devices. With recent encryption schemes (well the ones on Linux, given this article), I feel confident that overwriting the encryption keys gets me close enough to not leaking my data once I get rid of an old hard drive.

My harddrives (laptop, work laptop, desktop, server) contain emails, browser sessions, saved passwords, personal data from family and friends.

I do not want someone stealing my laptop on a train ride potentially being able to have all of that data.

With a proper real backup strategy, i have everything save. I do not need easy access to a hard drive from a broken computer.

But hey you do you :)

That's called LUKS2 and it's the default on Linux. You just type passphrase on boot. It's not tied to the motherboard.

I was happy to give up my side-hobby of drilling drives after FDE became standard everywhere. Plug and play is great, but you don't want it to be plug and play for whoever pulls your drive out of the trash.

Additional problem is if physical access is obtained, illegal material could be covertly added to the drive then picked up by the built in scanners in your OS. Depends on how important you are.

Same here. If anything happens I want a decent chance to be able to recover my data. The most I may do is create encrypted files, and some of them I've forgotten the passwords for, which makes me even more wary.

But it's also plug&play for anyone stealing your laptop, see for instance

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39941021

So long as you've backed up the key you can fairly easily decrypt on any machine.

I mean... you can use an encryption scheme compatible with this (if you know the password).

I suppose this makes some sense for home computers (burglars and police raids are rare) but for a laptop, you really don't want thieves getting all your details.

Ironically -- this probably was paranoid a few years ago, but now -- "ChatGPT, use this prepared prompt to extract all useful info from this hard drive"

the point is having a choice and the choice actually doing what it claimed.

What's not plug and play if using some sensible fde like idk, dm-crypt? You are only a passphrase away from mounting that drive in any other system you plug it into.