Late 2013 iMac. Should I encrypt it?

[jaybar]

Hi

Are there any good reasons to encrypt my late 2013 iMac using FileVault 2?

Thanks.

 

[padams35]

There are good reasons for and against.
For: Protects against a child, guest, repairman, thief, etc accessing your personal information or what not.
Against: Small I/O performance penalty, risk of loosing data if password forgotten.

It really comes down to how confident you are on restricting physical access to the device vs how important your information needs to be kept private. I concluded I only needed filevault active on my laptop. Someone else might conclude differently.

 

[posguy99]

Are there any good reasons to encrypt my late 2013 iMac using FileVault 2?

Correct question... are there any reasons not to? The answer is no, there are not. Hopefully soon, Apple will make that the default.

 

[iemcj]

Against: Small I/O performance penalty

Do you have any idea how much? And in what ways?

 

[Weaselboy]

Do you have any idea how much? And in what ways?

It just slows disk reads/writes a little. Here is a chart from ArsTechnica.

 

[cynics]

If you have a HDD it depends on what you value more, performance or privacy. Whole disk encryption could be overkill if you don't have anything on your computer. That isn't typically the case but is a possibility.

If you have an SSD I would encrypt the drive.

You may just want to wait for High Sierra though. Native encryption and its expanded somewhat with APFS.