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I have two SSDs in an external enclosure, exposed to the OS as independent drives. I want them to appear as a single encrypted APFS volume, with RAID 1 mirroring. I'd like to set up RAID via the native Disk Utility, rather than third-party software like SoftRAID.

In Disk Utility, I can create a RAID 1 set containing the two drives. However, in the format choices I only see APFS, not APFS (Encrypted).

If I create the RAID Set using APFS, right-click the volume in Finder and choose "Encrypt", the operation succeeds, and the volume works. However, Disk Utility immediately shows the RAID Set as "Offline" with one disk "Missing/Damaged". The same thing happens if I use Disk Utility to Erase the volume as APFS (Encrypted).

Is there any way to encrypt the volume without breaking the RAID Set?

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This is possible in Disk Utility by creating encrypted APFS volumes in the RAID's container disk.

Rough steps are:

  1. Use Disk Utility's Raid Assistant to create the RAID (select the APFS option).

  2. Disk Utility will create a single unencrypted APFS volume in the RAID container by default. You can safely delete this empty volume, and then create additional APFS volumes in the RAID container with encryption and whatever other configuration you would like. I used the "quota" setting to set the allocations I would have used in a traditional partitioning scheme.

You'll end up with something like this: macOS Ventura Disk Utility screenshot showing encrypted volumes on a RAID

(This worked for me on Ventura with RAID 0.)

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