Password protecting/Encrypting a 4TB Seagate portable HDD

Question

I want to password protect a 4 tb portable hdd i frequently use and travel with. I've read how password protecting isn't safe, but I'm not concerned about someone tech savvy trying to break in and steal my data. I just want to keep it out of reach from prying eyes in the house, work and college. Most of the people I deal with don't have the technical prowess to deal with encryption. I myself am new when it comes to things like this. I have used around 1.8tb on the hdd, filled with mostly personal pictures, videos, sensitive documents, movies, music and such. Is there any way to password protect the hdd and if not I've read on VeraCrypt encryption.

1. Should I partition the HDD into two 2tb halves and then encrypt one, move my data and then encrypt the other. While enabling on the go decryption.
2. Or should I encrypt it with the data as is.
3. Or move all the data elsewhere and clear the hdd and then go about encrypting.

Now you can see I'm still new to this, so all suggestions and help is welcome. I know it's a 4tb hdd and could take hours upto a day to encrypt. But what is the fastest solution as you can see safety isn't my no. 1 priority, just deterrence for prying eyes, guests and random people around and such. In hindsight I should've gone with a WD Passport or something else.

Answer 1

Either BitLocker (which I'd suggest if using Windows, especially if your machine has a TPM, but which is nearly unusable under Linux) or VeraCrypt (usable with all OSes) will work fine. Other software, such as dm-crypt/LUKS, should also be viable options (though I'm less sure if that one can be applied to already-in-use disks)

There's no reason to split the partitioning unless you are using a system that doesn't support GPT disks, which it's fairly safe to say you aren't. Most full-volume encryption tools - certainly both of the ones I recommended above - support doing the encryption in place, while the disk is in use. The data won't be fully secured until the encryption completes, of course, but that's true of any cryptosystem that needs to work on live data.