Chosen Solution
Hi folks - this follows from my original hardware question Looking for the definitive answer on upgrading my Mac. Good news is the hardware upgrade and Big Sur clean install all went very well. I now have a 240GB blade SSD as the Mac boot volume with Admin account, and a second 1TB SATA SSD as my Data volume for my regular user account and home folder. Where I’m stuck now before getting too far restoring data… is it still possible to encrypt the SATA SSD using FileVault or similar, such that drive contents are encrypted until login? It seems FileVault only supports the boot volume which is the blade only, and I tried creating an encrypted volume on the SATA but is does not automatically decrypt at login and login then fails. Seems this would be a fairly common use case especially for the higher end machines with multiple physical storage drives. Is there a simple way through this? Potentially I could recreate the Fusion set combining the 2 SSDs but understand that is a bad idea from performance and reliability POV (one drive dies and it all becomes inaccessible). Thanks much
For the record books, here is where I landed. After not being able to find a simple way to reenable FileVault or similar encryption on my Data Drive, I opted to refuse the 2 SSD’s per the simple steps here. Note there is a lot of outdated information elsewhere on refusing drives per older OS versions. As of BigSur and Nov 2020, these worked perfectly for me and took about 60 seconds to complete. While there is a lot of discussion online why technically this may not yield absolute maximum drive performance, so far practically it has been plenty fast for my purposes and far simpler in terms of leaving things where Mac OS expects them (on the boot drive), thus allowing things like: Simple reactivation of FileVault on the full volumeFull use of the combined 1.24TB of the 2 SSD’sNo monkeying around with advanced user settings to relocate the User Home folder. Hope others find it useful. djd
Did you add the Admin Blade drive user account to the SATA drive as well as add the SATA user account to the Blade drive?
