Filevault 2

[christo45]

I cannot turn on Filevault as I get an error message as follows:

Filevault can't be turned on for the disk Mac SSD
Some disk formats don't support the recovery partition required by encryption. To use encryption reinstall this version of OS X on a reformatted disk.

I'm using macOS Sierra
My SSD has a capacity of 239.2 GB but only 59.13GB is available.
Could this error be because there is insufficient space to do the encryption?

 

[bamf-hacker]

Yes you need to free up space to encrypt the drive. Encryption adds overhead to the data and will use a bit more space.