You are ordering external HDDs for use in your office, they are likely to be used for storing sensitive information such as PII and intellectual property. What is a good way to ensure the confidentiality of these external HDDs?
Answer Description
Only full disk encryption will ensure the data is not readable by malicious users. The file system will not matter as their security features can be easily bypassed by using an operating system that ignores them. For example Linux operating systems can be configured to ignore NTFS permissions which would allow access to any data on the disk.
Wikipedia
Disk encryption is a technology which protects information by converting it into unreadable code that cannot be deciphered easily by unauthorized people. Disk encryption uses disk encryption software or hardware to encrypt every bit of data that goes on a disk or disk volume. It is used to prevent unauthorized access to data storage.
Expressions full disk encryption (FDE) or whole disk encryption signify that everything on disk is encrypted, but the master boot record (MBR), …
Disk encryption - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia