encrypting 2TB USB drive for over 24 hours

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Level 1

4 points

encrypting 2TB USB drive for over 24 hours

Dear friends,

i have a 2TB USB drive I want to protect as it holds company data, so decided to encrypt it using the right click in Finder to encrypt the drive.

That is now over 24 hours ago, and it just feels like nothing is happening.

On the other hand if I right click on the drive in Finder, the 'encryption' option is greyed out and in Disk Utility the drive shows up in red print.

Should I wait for another day ? Feeling the drive it seems to be whizzing.

Grateful for some ideas.

MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on Apr 26, 2015 2:27 AM

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Answer 1

Jeff3422

Level 1

4 points

Aug 20, 2017 9:25 PM in response to hotkiwi

I hope it worked out well for you. I'm doing the same thing right now some two years later with a new 2TB external drive that I'd just formatted. If you type in

diskutil cs list into terminal it gives you all kinds of info on your connected drives including the encryption process status. It says I am currently at 57% encrypted after 24 hours so it should be finished in just under two days for me. Yes, for anyone having this issue now it can and does take THAT long! I've also done it before with a 3TB hard drive and it took a whole weekend, so buckle up, it's going to be a long ride, no way around it unfortunately.

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Answer 2

cdhw

Level 4

3,594 points

Apr 26, 2015 7:28 AM in response to hotkiwi

I think you need to be patient.

It can take a very long time to encrypt a drive that is not empty. You don't say what type of drive it is, or how full, but simply to read 2 TB of data from a drive in largish chunks and write it back again at say 50 MB/s would take 80 000 seconds or 22 hours.

If you open Utilities > Activity Monitor you will be able to see the in the Disk tab you can see the 'Data read/sec' and 'Data written/sec' rates and estimate their averages over a minute or two and see how they compare with the above estimate.

I'm not sure whether disk encryption will allow your Mac to sleep, but it may be worth using the System Preferences > Energy control panel to keep it awake until the process completes.

The least frustrating way to encrypt a drive is to reformat it and then turn on encryption while it is empty and then copy the files back onto it. Whether this is feasible depends on your individual circumstances, of course.

C.

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