Should you encrypt partitions on an external hard drive with BitLocker?

Question

Hard disks

I have an external hard drive from Samsung with a size of 1tb, running on USB 3.0. I use it for a variety of tasks - from storing multimedia files to storing various software. At the moment, I was very interested in the question, but “is it possible to allocate a separate partition in my external HDD, and then encrypt it using BitLocker?”. This section, of course, I need to store relatively important files - I always want to have a certain area protected from outside interference, and, at least relatively, from viruses.
The disk structure will look like this:
1) 400 GB NTFS partition encrypted with BitLocker
2) A regular partition of approximately 600 GB without encryption, which will later need to be formatted in various formats (NTFS, FAT, EXT)
If this is really possible, then what are the pitfalls of such an operation of an external HDD? Is it possible to kill a hard drive with BitLocker?
PS Also, while writing this question, a completely crazy idea came up: split the hard drive into many small partitions, and write installers of various operating systems to each of them - is it even possible? This, of course, is already more of a sporting interest, but still I would like to know whether it is worth mocking an external carrier like that .

Answer 1

Any section can be encrypted.
There may be several sections.
Encryption will not save you from viruses.
Encryption additionally loads the disk with read / write operations, so the lifetime will decrease, the speed of reading / writing to the partition will also decrease. How much? - Depends on the configuration of the computer, it's easier to check than to find a person with the same hardware.
For multiboot it is better to use boot-mounted disk images, see grub, clover, or a special Zalman VE-300 box for example.