Brand new hard drive encryption taking too long on time machine I have a brand new hard drive with nothing on it. I also bought a brand new external hard drive to use with my MacBook Pro. I'm in the process of backing up to time machine and the encryption is taking forever. Why is it taking so long when there's nothing on my hard drive?
The amount of time it takes to encrypt a drive is a function of its size, not its contents.

Your brand-new hard drive full of zeroes still needs to be scrambled so that no one can figure out that it’s full of zeroes. That will take just as long as encrypting the same amount of arbitrary values.