Fortunately mac os x provides a few native solutions to help you protect your data on external hard drives.
Lock usb drive mac.
Insert your usb drive into the mac and open a finder window.
In the sidebar select the storage device you want to.
Connect the usb flash drive to your mac and find its disk icon on the desktop or finder sidebar then right click and select encrypt usb stick name from the context menu.
When you see your removable disk in the left panel right click it and select encrypt from the contextual menu.
Encrypt external hard drive on mac.
The best part about this application is that it s available for both windows and macos devices.
Encrypt and protect a storage device with a password in disk utility on mac.
If you do not see the encryption option in the drop down menu your usb flash drive has not been formatted using the guid partition map.
But in order to do so the external drive should be using the guid partition table gpt scheme.
In the disk utility app on your mac choose view show all devices.
One option is to fully encrypt the external drive and lock it with password.
In the filevault window you can set a password by typing it in twice as well as set a password hint.