Encrypted drives and Steam

[Kerry]

Hey, I have my Steam setup on a Bitlocker-encrypted drive. Now when I try to log in it starts up the program, but when I get to when it's logging me in, the dialog box disappears and Steam does not come up.

Also, my Steam library (excluding a few games) is all on an external hard drive encrypted the same way.

Any idea what's wrong here?

[Silicon Vampire]

first guess? running games in general from encrypted drive is a very bad idea...

Why? Why would you do this?

[Kerry]

There are idiots who I pissed off trying to hack me.

So I encrypted the hard drives as a precaution. They can't mess with that.

[nullable]

Originally posted by Silicon Vampire:

first guess? running games in general from encrypted drive is a very bad idea...

Why? Why would you do this?

So people can't h4x0r his daters.

OP:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/359543951733906288/

This may be relevant. Have you done any research on this yourself, or is this your first stop?

Edit:

Originally posted by Kerry Freeman:

There are idiots who I pissed off trying to hack me.

So I encrypted the hard drives as a precaution. They can't mess with that.

I was joking, so this is even funnier to me.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Silicon Vampire:

first guess? running games in general from encrypted drive is a very bad idea...

Why? Why would you do this?

Why is a Global Moderator telling people not to use a native data encryption program? I use BitLocker on all my drives with zero problems, including on my NVMe boot drive, still getting over 2.7GB/sec read speed.


The issue could be that you do not have auto-unlock enabled for your data drives. Furthermore, if your data drives are considered "removable" by Windows they will not be unlocked until after you log in, so there could be a delay before the drive is unlocked.

Make sure all drives your Steam Client and games are on have been unlocked and try again. If you have further issues, then it might just be regular NTFS permissions issues.

[Silicon Vampire]

I never told anyone NOT to use it. I said it a bad idea.

Encryption, no matter how fast the computer is takes CPU, memory, sometimes some extra hard drive activity, and most importantly, TIME.

Not ideal for any game I know of... but hey, your choice.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Kerry Freeman:

There are idiots who I pissed off trying to hack me.

So I encrypted the hard drives as a precaution. They can't mess with that.

Encrypted drives don’t protect against that since any attacker is going to take control of your OS while it’s running and screw you over. Encryption is only useful for offline attacks like when your computer is stolen. Encrypting your drive doesnt protect you from phishing or ransom ware or anything else that runs while you have the OS running. You’re functionally creating overhead for something that won’t protect you from anything practical

We use encrypted drives since in my field laptops are lost or even stolen by competitors (I’ve seen prototypes and cameras have been stolen off a plane), or to prevent HIPPA violations. Encrypting protects data leakage in these situations. We don’t use it to keep “hackers” out. That’s what anti virus and other products are for.

Regardless steam doesn’t care about whether the drive is encrypted or not. As long as it’s accessable

Encrypted drives are slow and thus you are likely going to experience slow load times. Slow update times. Hitching in open world games as it tries to stream game data from the encrypted drive. And lower FPS as your cpu is starved for resources having to constantly decrypt data

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Crashed:

Originally posted by Silicon Vampire:

first guess? running games in general from encrypted drive is a very bad idea...

Why? Why would you do this?

Why is a Global Moderator telling people not to use a native data encryption program? I use BitLocker on all my drives with zero problems, including on my NVMe boot drive, still getting over 2.7GB/sec read speed.


The issue could be that you do not have auto-unlock enabled for your data drives. Furthermore, if your data drives are considered "removable" by Windows they will not be unlocked until after you log in, so there could be a delay before the drive is unlocked.

Make sure all drives your Steam Client and games are on have been unlocked and try again. If you have further issues, then it might just be regular NTFS permissions issues.

Because encrypted drives doesnt protect against “hackers”

It’s overhead that provides no practical benefit if that is what the OP “thinks” it’s doing. Thus it’s a question of why they’re doing something that has a drastic impact on performance that functionally provides zero benefit for most normal users and most attack vectors said users would be subjected to

This is like installing a bank vault as your front door, while having glass patio doors in your back yard

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Silicon Vampire:

I never told anyone NOT to use it. I said it a bad idea.

Encryption, no matter how fast the computer is takes CPU, memory, sometimes some extra hard drive activity, and most importantly, TIME.

Not ideal for any game I know of... but hey, your choice.

On a modern processor, actually there is very little overhead thanks to the AES-NI extension. In fact, some SSDs can actually do the BitLocker encryption in their own controller, negating all performance impacts.

[Crashed]

Do you have any benchmarks that show a severe impact of BitLocker on recent generation CPUs?

[Silicon Vampire]

The point is, it will not do what the OP is expecting

[Kerry]

So any suggestions as to what to do?

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Kerry Freeman:

So any suggestions as to what to do?

If you don't want to decrypt your drives, make sure they are in the unlocked state before starting Steam. Once the drive is unlocked, the usual fixes (file permissions, chkdsk, etc.) apply just as they would to an unencrypted drive; BitLocker is transparent to your programs and most of your operating system. In fact the system drive gets unlocked before it even loads the Windows kernel!

[Kerry]

Originally posted by Crashed:

Originally posted by Kerry Freeman:

So any suggestions as to what to do?

If you don't want to decrypt your drives, make sure they are in the unlocked state before starting Steam. Once the drive is unlocked, the usual fixes (file permissions, chkdsk, etc.) apply just as they would to an unencrypted drive; BitLocker is transparent to your programs and most of your operating system. In fact the system drive gets unlocked before it even loads the Windows kernel!

Problem is, Steam just won't launch. I attempted a Steam launch this morning and it got to the part where Steam logs in and never gave me the Steam library screen.

[Washell]

Originally posted by Crashed:

Originally posted by Silicon Vampire:

I never told anyone NOT to use it. I said it a bad idea.

Encryption, no matter how fast the computer is takes CPU, memory, sometimes some extra hard drive activity, and most importantly, TIME.

Not ideal for any game I know of... but hey, your choice.

On a modern processor, actually there is very little overhead thanks to the AES-NI extension. In fact, some SSDs can actually do the BitLocker encryption in their own controller, negating all performance impacts.

Some SSDs don't have a master password set in the firmware that handles that. You need to double check when using hardware encryption that the ssd is using a proper implementation.

[Satoru]

Are you using full disk encryption or only folder/partition based encrytpion

i have steam working on a full disk encrypted laptop fine. so steam works fine on a full disk encryption.