tangent wrote:There's a bit in that article about watching for encryption to complete, but you don't actually need to wait for that.
After a few days of experimentation, I've come to believe that while it's probably true that you don't absolutely
need to wait, you probably
should wait.
Without waiting for the encryption to finish, in 10.9.5, this bug:
You may receive a pop-up claiming the disk isn't readable by this computer. This leads to one step that can be confusing: when unlocking the disk (e.g., on startup), the "bug" will make OS X believe the disk wasn't unlocked, and thus "wiggle," presenting the prompt again.
Assuming you entered your password correctly, the encrypted volume should now be unlocked, despite the misleading wiggle, and you can safely close the dialog box by clicking "Cancel."
…became much more annoying. For some reason, not waiting for the encryption to finish before creating a pool, strips the names of the disks in the dialogue box. The prompt asks you to enter the the password for disk " ". Depending on the number of disks you have, and your naming/password scheme, not knowing the hard drive name can make entering passwords mildly annoying to very frustrating.
I suspect that the disks names might reappear in the dialogue box after the encryption finishes. But after many frustrating attempts of guessing which disk I was entering a password for, I gave up, restarted the process, and decided to let the encryption finish before creating a pool.
I also discovered that Core Storage encryption is limited by thread count. So, on an i3, it would only encrypt four of my seven drives. Luckily I had another Mac and moved three drives over to speed along the process. Four terabyte drives take right around 28 hours to finish encrypting.
A tip for anyone else dealing with many drives and the password "wiggle" bug. It's much easier to just hit "cancel" when the finder asks for your password(s). Then open up Disk Utility and enter the passwords - it gives you a visual so you know you're entering the password(s) correctly.
Another tip, I'm convinced that, at least in 10.9.5, the Mac actually
must be restarted before Core Storage starts processing the encryption command(s). I know it seems weird, but in the past week or so I've encrypted
many drives and each time nothing happened until I restarted. At the very least, diskutil corestorage doesn't report any progress until a restart occurs.
Don't know how many people are using Core Storage encryption with OpenZFS, but I hope these observations come in handy for someone else.