After doing a lot of digging, I finally discovered an old OSXDaily.com article from 2012 that claims the following:
"The encryption process can be very quick for smaller drives like USB keys and SD cards, but can take quite a while for large external hard drives used for backups or personal data. Be prepared to wait a bit for anything larger than a few GB in size, as the general encryption-to-GB time ratio seems to be about 1GB per minute." Okay, so 1GB/min it is. Wait, 5TB would mean ... 5,000 minutes! That's 83⅓ hours!! That's THREE AND A HALF DAYS!!! I think the drive will a steaming lump of metal by then! Ah, had I but known this before starting... -Carl > On Jul 9, 2016, at 12:51 PM, Carl Hoefs <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I just hooked up a new external Seagate 5TB HDD, reformatted it Mac OS > Extended, Journaled, and repartitioned it to have 1 GUID partition. All's > well with that. > > Mount Point : /Volumes/Untitled 2 > Format : Encrypted Logical Partition > Capacity : 5 TB (5,000,265,859,072 Bytes) > Available : 5 TB (4,998,959,538,176 Bytes) > Used : 1.31 GB (1,306,320,896 Bytes) > Owners Enabled : No > Number of Folders : 19 > Number of Files : 66 > > Next, I turned on encryption. This made the drive *very* busy, and it's been > chugging away for about 4 hours now! Surely there's no need to encrypting the > formatting, so what on earth is it doing? The only files on the drive were > placed there by OS X for the default Spotlight DB. > > I had plans to restore my other failing external HDD to this new one today, > but I was hoping to have a quiescent drive... > > Can someone explain why encrypting an empty drive should take hours and hours? > -Carl > > _______________________________________________ > MacOSX-talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
