I purchased PGP Whole Disk Encryption for my Macbook Pro, and it's exactly what I need. After the Symantec acquisition, PGP no longer sells single licenses of the software so I can't purchase a second copy for my iMac.
Since I can no longer buy PGP Whole Disk Encryption, can anyone suggest an alternative? I'm currently using Filevault, but I specifically want whole disk encryption. I'm using a quad-core i7 iMac running Snow Leopard and I'm also hoping to protect my Windows Bootcamp partition.
I use Trucrypt for the PC but they also make a MAC version as well. It's very fast on the fly encryption and works extremely well.
Highly recommend this software.
Supported Operating Systems
TrueCrypt currently supports the following operating systems:
* Windows 7
* Windows 7 x64 (64-bit) Edition
* Windows Vista
* Windows Vista x64 (64-bit) Edition
* Windows XP
* Windows XP x64 (64-bit) Edition
* Windows Server 2008
* Windows Server 2008 x64 (64-bit)
* Windows Server 2003
* Windows Server 2003 x64 (64-bit)
* Windows 2000 SP4
* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (32-bit)
* Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
* Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
Lion is out and indeed features whole-partition encryption. Conversion on a Core 2 Duo MacBook Late 2008 takes about 1min per GiB of the disk, so if you have 250GiB disk, you're looking at a 4–5 hour conversion period.
THe performance hit, even on this hold machine, is not too noticeable; however, CPU usage increases dramatically when copying files, maxing out at about 25%.
In contrast, if you have an iMac, a Mac mini, or a Mac Book Air from 2011, the CPU comes with hardware support for the involved ciphers and the CPU usage should not increase much if at all.
Bear in mind that higher CPU usage translates to faster battery drain, even if you don't feel your Mac is slower than before.
More info about testing speed can be found here: http://simon.heimlicher.com/hints/macosx/file_vault_2
