Louwrentius

Read the comments as they may provide useful information for your particular situation

I boot my iMac from an external FW800 SSD. I found out that it is impossible to encrypt this disk using the new FileVault as part of Lion.

Furthermore, I also found out that if you have a disk with a Bootcamp partition FileVault will also refuse to start the encryption process. I'm not trying to encrypt the Bootcamp volume, just the bootable Mac OS X Lion installation.

It may be advised to stay away from Lion if you need a setup similar to this one and also need disk encryption.

My 1 TB hard drive of my 2011 27" iMac was partitioned with:

1. A bootable partition with Mac OS X Lion
2. Time machine partition (I use an external SSD as my main OS)
3. Bootcamp partition with windows
4. A data partition containg... data.

The problem is that CoreStorage is too new. Disk Utility in Lion cannot cope with CoreStorage volumes. So when I decided to encrypt the bootable partition using the new Full Disk Encryption based on filevault, I could no longer manage my other partitions.

Furthermore, bootcamp got killed since it needs to be installed on one of the first three partitions on the disk. Due to the whole CoreStorage stuff and filevault, it became the fifth partition and it got killed. I couldn't get it back to life It wouldn't boot.

What I want now is to create a setup where I have three partitions:

1. A bootable (Boot) clone of my external FW800 SSD boot disk using SuperDuper
2. A Bootcamp volume running Windows (for games)
3. A data partition storing well.. data.

I want to encrypt the boot disk and the data partition. If this is going to work, I don't know.

It may be advised to stay away from Lion if you need a setup similar to this one and also need disk encryption.

I wrote an article about the subject of getting beyond the limits of gigabit network file transfers. My solution is to use multiple gigabit network cards and use Linux interface bonding to create virtual 2 gigabit network interfaces. The solution is to use mode 0 or round robin bonding. I do not use a switch although this also works fine. Instead, I just connected two cabled between the two machines.

In my original article, I couldn't get pas 150 MB/s file transfer speeds so the results weren't that great. However, these poor results were due to hardware compatibility issues. Although the on board network card worked fine, the intel e1000e card in the PCIe slot didn't perform well. I replaced it with a HP Broadcom card and everything is working smooth now.

With two gigabit network cards bonded together I can achieve 220 MB/s through a single file transfer over NFS.

It would be interesting if a quad port server adapter would be able to achieve 440 MB/s network speeds, but I don't have the equipment to test this.