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New 2017 MBP - Question regarding FileVault

Curlyp

Curlyp

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 6, 2015
10
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Hello All,

I am still semi new to the Mac world; This is my second MacBook Pro. Going through the startup, I am asked if I want to turn on FileVault. I know what it is and fully understand Full-Disk Encyption; however, I am not sure if users are experiencing any performance issues on the new 2017 MBP.

Do you recommend turning it on, or is the performance hit not worth it?

I have the new 2017 MBP i5, 8GB RAM, 256 GB. It was just delivered!

Thanks!
 
Personally, I recommend using FV on any portable Mac. It's not as important on a desktop that sits at home. Sure there may be a tiny performance hit, but the security far outweighs the small performance hit. I run it on my 2016 tbMBP and on my Mid 2014 rMBP and don't have any performance issues at all. If for any reason my Mac was stolen (which I hope never happens) I want my data to be safe.
 
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I agree with the previous post wholeheartedly. Any performance hit will be negligible. I have used File Vault since it was available and I've never noticed a slowdown.
 
The encryption/decryption routines are hard coded into intel's silicon so it takes no extra time to run the data through this process. I converted my laptop to FileVault about two weeks after I got it and have seen no impact.

The disk encryption progress will take time so you may want to run it overnight after you've made a time machine backup in case anything goes wrong during conversion.

I did not set up a firmware password yet, I just did the FileVault conversion.
 
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On SSD Macs with modern Intel processors (which have hardware-accelerated encryption) there is practically no performance hit.
 
Thank you all for your info on this. I will go ahead and setup the laptop with it. It's brand new, I just received it today, so I am sure it will take no time to setup.
 
Yesterday got my new MacBook Pro and asked me for FV I agree to encryption.

On a stolen macbook with FV off how can Anybody access disk data without tearing apart the all MacBook to get the flash drive?
 
al404 said:
Yesterday got my new MacBook Pro and asked me for FV I agree to encryption.

On a stolen macbook with FV off how can Anybody access disk data without tearing apart the all MacBook to get the flash drive?
Click to expand...
they could connect your laptop to another laptop and explore files from your laptop that way.
 
al404 said:
I did not think that it could also be possible to use a live linux and look at hard disk data
Click to expand...
Theoretically as long as both the encryption key and password is strong and there isn’t an exploit for FV then you can’t. FV is software based encryption similar to bitlocker, Microsoft’s version of FV. There is a way to mount a FV drive on Linux using a special software library BUT you need the encryption key or password to do so.
 
The biggest performance hit is logging in takes some extra time and your user icon us grayed out before you supply the password.
 
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