Best method to encrypt your hard drive

[Steven Ruttenberg]

Guess this would go here.
Ever since Apple went to Mojave, my mid 2012 Mac can no longer use file vault. I need to encrypt my hard drive, but also want it to be simple, yet secure.

[EdSawyer]

why can't you use filevault? That's easily the best choice. I have macs of that vintage, running high sierra though for now.

[chris_4622]

I had set up File Vault a few years ago on my mid 2012 MacBook Pro and I just checked in System Preferences that it is on, using Mojave.

[jp]

Hope you have a SSD in that.. Encryption options slow things down quite a bit and you might think something is wrong with the computer running encryption on a mechanical hard drive.

[domaz]

Hope you have a SSD in that.. Encryption options slow things down quite a bit and you might think something is wrong with the computer running encryption on a mechanical hard drive.

I doubt you would notice much difference in most cases. Mechanical hard drives can hold their own against SSD doing sequential reads, where SSD performance is really good is random access reads across the drive. FileVault shouldn't be throwing data around the drive willy-nilly though so it's not going to make a difference there.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

why can't you use filevault? That's easily the best choice. I have macs of that vintage, running high sierra though for now.

The upgrade to Mojave, forces you to turn it off to upgrade and then disables it if you are running a MacPro earlier than 2013. The video cards are third party and won't provide the requisite start up screens, etc to allow file vault to run. Apple did this intentionally by not warning people wanting to upgrade that file vault would not work on their machine once they upgraded to force people to dump the machines and get the newer ones with Apple proprietary video cards in the ashcan 2013 MacPro.

They are coming out with an update later this year, if they fix that coding issue and file vault is available again, great, if not, I am reverting to High Sierra (most stable I had rn since I got my MacPro in 2012. And Mojave has been giving people with 2013 and newer all kinds of fits. So we shall see.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

Hope you have a SSD in that.. Encryption options slow things down quite a bit and you might think something is wrong with the computer running encryption on a mechanical hard drive.

I was using a 7200rpm 2Tb drive for my OS and file vault encrypted and it worked with no slow down. I now have a 2TB hard drive for my OS with my original 2TB becoming the 5th internal drive that I will back up the SSD to as a bootable drive. That way if I loose my SSD, I will have a mirrored copy of it automatically I can use until I would replace the bad SSD.

I didn't even know I could have more than 4 hard drives in the case. It holds 5! So I have 3 disks at raid 0 for my scratch disks for Photoshop, etc (I will be upgrading those to SSDs shortly), the SSD OS and the 5th drive as the OS bootable backup.

All told I have 23TB of storage and I need to upgrade my 8 external to 10 or 12TB disks. I have an infinite amount of storage space at home that is 23 times what my company allows and we employ over 250,000 people world wide. Go figure :)

[Steven Ruttenberg]

I had set up File Vault a few years ago on my mid 2012 MacBook Pro and I just checked in System Preferences that it is on, using Mojave.

It is just the MacPro work stations that have the issue to the best of my knowledge because of the 3rd party graphics cards.

[Jac@stafford.net]

I doubt you would notice much difference in most cases. Mechanical hard drives can hold their own against SSD doing sequential reads, where SSD performance is really good is random access reads across the drive. FileVault shouldn't be throwing data around the drive willy-nilly though so it's not going to make a difference there.

By design, SSD drives do not create contiguous files as can fixed discs be specified. See 'wear leveling', and also consider why we cannot set an SSD to erase-delete rather than just delete.

[Steven Ruttenberg]

I downloaded trial version of pgp whle disk encryption from Symantec (I used it before Symantec bought them) and it will only allow me to create a virtual disk which is useless to me. And their customer support sucks A**!

Looks like a freeware version which makes me a bit nervous. But apple is releasing a new OS this year so maybe they fixed that restriction so we can use file vault again. A lot of people having issues with Mojave.

[Tin Can]

Yes!


By design, SSD drives do not create contiguous files as can fixed discs be specified. See 'wear leveling', and also consider why we cannot set an SSD to erase-delete rather than just delete.

[EdSawyer]

Have you tried what is described here?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mp5-1-what-you-have-to-do-to-upgrade-to-mojave-bootrom-upgrade-instructions.2142418/page-11#post-26606427