Enncypted drives differences

[Tech198]

Hi all..

What is the technical difference between right clicking an external dive and "Encrypt" volume, vs in Disk Utility on the "Erase" tab selecting "Mac OS X Journled, Encrypted". ?

Does it use the same command ? As I've experienced the first meted of right clicking after partition is created to sometimes "pause" the process, while doing it with DU when creating partition, it works ok.

 

[Weaselboy]

The end result is exactly the same, but the process is a bit different. From DU you are just reformatting in an encrypted format and not really encrypting any data (since the disk is erased as part of the format) so it goes very quickly.

When you do it with a right click like you mentioned the system has to go through and encrypt all the data that is already on the disk, and that takes much longer.