I’m trying Knox 1.5 out and I have a couple of questions. I’ve never used encrypted volumes or FileVault before.

Is there a limit to the size of volume that can be encrypted? I’d like to “reformat a volume as an encryted vault” using an external 500 GB drive. It looks like its going to take about 5 hours to complete the formatting and I’d like to know that it will actually finish. (I’m about 1.5 hours in at this point).

Is there a performace hit when accessing files on an encrypted volume?

Thanks for your help.

There is no upper limit that we know of.

For whole-disk vaults, only the creation of a “fixed-size” vault takes the kind of time you are seeing. Knox is basically encrypting the whole disk even though you have nothing on it—writing 500GB of encrypted zeroes takes a long time with current hard drive speeds. The creation of a “strechable” vault is almost instantaneous in comparison.

There is a performance impact for both reading and writing, but with modern processors, we find that it’s usually not a practical concern. You are only likely to encounter the performance hit if you are working with video or very high bandwidth audio applications.

Thanks for your help. The 500 GB drive took over 8 hours to encrypt. It seems to work fine. I would have done a strechable vault but I don’t want anyone to have access to the drive at all.