If your external hard drive is fully disk encrypted, is it normal that when you connect your drive to the computer, it doesn’t show up where you normally find all of your connected devices, that i’ll only show up once you mount it and decrypt it in VeraCrypt? Is that a good thing?
Yes that’s normal. Until the computer knows what decryption key to use with that specific disk, the disk is basically gibberish. In a sense that’s good because anything you put on there is largely very private but bad because it’s a bit of an inconvenience and losing the decryption key means losing the data on the disk. Up to you.
It is normal if you have the encrypted drive. If you want it to show up normally without password on any machibe than remove encryption.
You need to define what you mean by “decrypt”, if you mean that you need to somehow tell when mounting what passphrase/secret key you used to the OS and all the operations then with that disk will encrypt/decrypt data on the fly, sure, this is why you bother with it.
If you mean that you have to wait overnight (or even days) for the disk to get decrypted, and then it’ll be all clear text, no, that shouldn’t be happening.
Yes
u/MeCJay12 summarized things well.
You have to supply a passphrase, PSK, token, or 2FA to decrypt.
Consider full disk encryption as a large container covering the entire block device (HDD / SSD, etc). Inside the encrypted container is a filesystem which contains links to the locations of data (files) on the device. Veracrypt operates silently in the background. Once you supply correct authentication, the filesystem becomes visible to the kernel, is autodetected, and can be mounted.