Does Full Disk Encryption using Veracrypt on a home PC affect my gaming performance and cloud storage options?

Question

I'm considering encrypting my gaming machine SSD (A Samsung 850 EVO, 1 TB) and HDD (1 TB classic HDD) with Veracrypt for the added security (although it's unlikely i'll need it). However, I have some concerns:

• I use Dropbox to have backups and cross-machine syncs of different files. These files must still work on other machines, as well as be accessible through the online interface;
• As a gamer, I have almost 3 dozen games installed, and many of them use the cloud storage from the DRM platform to store a backup of saved games and user profiles. These profiles must still work after encryption.
• I don't want my gaming experience to be affected. This means:
  • All games must still work the same after encryption as before without reinstallation;
  • All games must have the same performance as before encryption;
  • All my cloud saves and Game Save Manager backups made on my encrypted machine also need to work on my unencrypted laptop and vice versa.
• My 1Password vault synched via Dropbox must still work on my other devices (Android phone + gaming laptop).

Does Veracrypt encryption affect the above concerns? and if so, to what extent?

Answer 1

TL,DR: You don't have to worry about any of those points.

The encryption is on a layer bellow the files, so from your games' point of view, nothing changed. It's almost like cloning your Samsung HDD to a Hitachi one, with exactly the same size, and putting it back.

Your games will still run with almost the same performance. You will incur on a very small increment on load times, because the back-end will have to decrypt the data before your game reads it, but the penalty will be almost negligible. Unless you have a program to measure the timings a couple of times, you will not notice it.

The same applies to your Dropbox files: they don't change. Only the low level representation of the file will be changed, but for your applications, they are still the same.

So encrypt your disk. Your files will be there, untouched, but remember the password. If you forget the password, your data is lost.