MS says " Approximately how long will initial encryption take when BitLocker is turned on? BitLocker encryption occurs in the background while you continue to work, and the system remains usable, but encryption times vary depending on the type of drive that is being encrypted, the size of the drive, and the speed of the drive. If you are encrypting very large drives, you may want to set encryption to occur during times when you will not be using the drive." Does anyone have a better estimate? For example, Pointsec encrypts 10GB an hour on the average.

i appreciate that the statement is vague but it's really quite accurate. i don't in any way doubt the metrics you stated for pointsec. however, the upper and lower bounds for that average could be broad (or overloaded). disk encryption has a few variables that really dictate the duration and every application would be bound by these. that said, it is possible to see differences between different applications. sorry to play downer. i still think that you raise an interesting point - for anyone that has the hardware and time (ahem MSFT), it would be interesting to see a rough matrix of cpu, disk speeds, disk size, and media type to time to encryption. hth /richhttp://cbfive.com/blog