FileVault on M1-M3 MacBooks

[NYPRJKE]

Hello Everyone,
I would like to know if Apple FileVault can work alongside Protools on the Apple silicon MacBooks.

[JFreak]

Hi, welcome to the community.

Mx storage is so wicked fast you will not even notice FileVault is turned on.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Hi, welcome to the community.

Mx storage is so wicked fast you will not even notice FileVault is turned on.

Most folks never notice any performance difference with filevault being turned on, because all T2 protected, and Apple Silicon Macs always encrypt the drive even if FileVault is turned off. The Mac is doing all the encryption work, just with no user visible key. At least for the internal SSDs.

And yes modern SSDs are fast, but many tests claiming to show no encryption overhead are laughably bad/not measuring anything because for many users its always on.

But there is no info in the original post here about what drives we are talking about. Internal SSD it sure makes no difference. I would not enable encryption on external HDD or slow external SSD and use them as audio drives. I might encrypt external backup/archive drives including HDD if I was worried about theft/loss of data and was sure I had a robust key backup/recovery process in place.

[Frank Kruse]

I've been working on encrypted drives for 10+ years exclusively without noticing any negative impact. Internal, external, spinning, SSD, doesn't matter. All my drives where HFS+ encrypted in the old days and now APFS encrypted and one project we did with TrueCrypt (when it was still an active product) when extra security was needed (hidden volumes and plausible deniability when traveling) which also worked totally fine.
Absolutely no practical impact even on machines and drives that people now consider as "too slow". Running massive post sessions with TBs of audio and hundreds of tracks.