[FireBeyond]

Encryption on a brand new Mac typically takes about an hour or so, unless you're dumping a whole load of data. I've always installed (via Homebrew Cask) a bunch of software on my new Macs and FileVault is caught up by the time it's done.

AES-NI - hardware encryption. There's no way FileVault should be taking that long unless you dump hundreds of gigs of data on at once.

[majewsky]

To put some numbers on this, `cryptsetup benchmark` on my Linux notebook reports 1329 MiB/s encryption speed and 1346 MiB/s decryption speed for 256-bit AES in XTS mode (which is the default stream cipher for Linux's LUKS disk encryption). And that's on a 2012 Core i3.

If a modern CPU has AES-NI, I would never expect disk access speed to be constrained by the disk encryption. (Unless, maybe, if you're copying from one internal disk to the other, or if you're copying across a 10gig ethernet.)