To protect the security of files/data, I have always found it preferable to hide and/or set an access password for a partition rather than to encrypt the partition or an entire hard disk. The reasons are: 1) The performance and efficiency of reading/writing encrypted files are extremely low; 2) As far as I know, although an encrypted file is hard to crack, it is the most likely to happen and the most deadly for users to forget their encryption key - there is no solution at all; 3) In fact, even if you just hide one partition without password protection, few people would expect you to protect your private data in this way.