Just for closure, I thought that I'd note that my 5TB empty drive finally DID 
finish encrypting itself, just now, and I started it 2 weeks ago! That boils 
down to what, 250MB/min? Apparently it has to encrypt/rewrite every sector in 
every track on the disk. Crazy.
Oh, and now the option to "Decrypt" is present. LOL
-Carl

> On Jul 9, 2016, at 5:30 PM, Carl Hoefs <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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
>> 
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