So it appears Apple recently showed a little love for it's software RAID support under the Disk Utility GUI.
In the past I've only ever been successful encrypting an Apple RAID volume via the terminal using the diskutil command to create a cs volume. Starting with HS.0, Disk Utility was unable to status my encrypted RAID, causing Disk Utility to lock up indefinitely, ultimatley requiring a force quit. So I got in the habit of ejecting the encrypted RAID before bringing up Disk Utility to service others volumes and servicing the encrypted RAID solely from terminal.
This week (after upgrading to HS.4) I brought up Disk Utility without first ejecting the encrypted RAID volume and to my surprise it did not lock up Disk Utility.
But the more interesting surprise is that I discover an Apple RAID volume can be now formatted as encrypted from within the Disk Utility itself. I've tested this several time, breaking and remaking a RAID volume and then selecting it from within Disk Utility and reformatting the RAID volume as encrypted. Even APFS seemed to work for encrypting a RAID volume, although I didn't test as much since I use my RAID for Time Machine.
As before Time Machine still recognizes and works perfectly with the encrypted RAID volume but it still can't encrypt it from within the TM utility, have to do that before. But now it can be done from Disk Utility instead of terminal.
So now an encrypted Apple RAID volume can be created from start to finish without ever accessing terminal.
On a side note, I did a little Frankensteining and using a combination of Disk Utility and terminal commands to successfully fuse a SSD to a RAID0 volume as a faster encrypted Fusion drive. Haven't had time to test it much for reliability or booting. But it took and was accessible as a complete volume.
In the past I've only ever been successful encrypting an Apple RAID volume via the terminal using the diskutil command to create a cs volume. Starting with HS.0, Disk Utility was unable to status my encrypted RAID, causing Disk Utility to lock up indefinitely, ultimatley requiring a force quit. So I got in the habit of ejecting the encrypted RAID before bringing up Disk Utility to service others volumes and servicing the encrypted RAID solely from terminal.
This week (after upgrading to HS.4) I brought up Disk Utility without first ejecting the encrypted RAID volume and to my surprise it did not lock up Disk Utility.
But the more interesting surprise is that I discover an Apple RAID volume can be now formatted as encrypted from within the Disk Utility itself. I've tested this several time, breaking and remaking a RAID volume and then selecting it from within Disk Utility and reformatting the RAID volume as encrypted. Even APFS seemed to work for encrypting a RAID volume, although I didn't test as much since I use my RAID for Time Machine.
As before Time Machine still recognizes and works perfectly with the encrypted RAID volume but it still can't encrypt it from within the TM utility, have to do that before. But now it can be done from Disk Utility instead of terminal.
So now an encrypted Apple RAID volume can be created from start to finish without ever accessing terminal.
On a side note, I did a little Frankensteining and using a combination of Disk Utility and terminal commands to successfully fuse a SSD to a RAID0 volume as a faster encrypted Fusion drive. Haven't had time to test it much for reliability or booting. But it took and was accessible as a complete volume.
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