Mr Paul
Level 1 (4 points)
Mac OS X

Q: Can I encrypt an external Thunderbolt SSD I boot from

Greetings!

I have a mid 2011 iMac which was rather slow.  Based upon advice from the Apple Support group, I purchased a 480 GB External Thunderbolt SSD.  I loaded the latest version of El Capitan on it and various software such as Lightroom.  Now I  boot my iMac from this device.  It is much faster than the internal iMac drive both in booting up and running applications such as Lightroom.

 

I keep my data on the internal iMac drive.  The internal iMac drive is encrypted.  However, the external drive still has data on it from email, notes, and other Apple software that I assume stores it on the boot drive.

 

Is it possible to encrypt the external SSD also? And still boot from it?   The external drive still keeps a lot of personal information on it - email, notes, etc. 

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

Posted on Jun 23, 2016 10:13 AM

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Mr Paul

Q: Can I encrypt an external Thunderbolt SSD I boot from

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  • by mende1,

    mende1 mende1 Jun 23, 2016 10:50 AM in response to Mr Paul
    Level 10 (93,314 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 23, 2016 10:50 AM in response to Mr Paul

    You can use FileVault to encrypt your SSD, as you're using it as your iMac's startup disk. Go to System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> FileVault, and enable it. Encryption may take a while, but after that you'll be asked for your user password before loading up OS X.