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Q: FileVault with external disks?

I just encrypted my boot drive on my desktop iMac with FileVault.

 

I have three external disks that I would like to encrypt, especially since they're a lot easier to steal than my iMac, which is bolted to an LCD arm on the wall.

 

I have the following disks:

  • LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2
  • Newertech 4TB
  • Newertech 6 TB

 

When I tried encrypting the LaCie, it said "You can’t convert an AppleRAID volume to Core Storage." The LaCie is a set of 2 PCIe SSDs preconfigured in RAID 0.

 

When I tried to encrypt the Newertech hard drives, I got this error message: "A Recovery System for the targeted disk is required."

 

How can I encrypt these external disks? There's not much point in having my iMac encrypted when I have backup drives sitting right next to it that are not encrypted and far easier to run off with if someone broke in to the house.

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Jul 10, 2016 7:46 AM