You can lock your hard drive partitions containing confidential files with BitLocker. Hence, it is not suggested to disable BitLocker encryption if your device supports BitLocker. However, it may ...

Laptops, external drives, and USB sticks are especially vulnerable to data theft, but with Windows and a few tools, you can protect them using encryption.

If you want to configure or change how BitLocker unlocks OS C Drive at Startup with PIN, USB flash drive or TPM in Windows 11/10, see this post.

The key may still be available in live memory or memory dumps. AFAIK, BitLocker doesn't do anything to actively wipe any instance of the key that may still reside in memory.

Microsoft warned customers this week of incorrect BitLocker drive encryption errors being shown in some managed Windows environments.