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I recently bought a laptop which has OPAL compliant Self encrypting hard drive.

I wanted to know how I could use/check the status of the Hardware Encryption features of an OPAL drive (windows, linux or else)? How do I make sure it's active and working?

northox
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Jean-François Rioux
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about product support, which should be directed towards its manufacturer. – TildalWave Apr 05 '14 at 21:08
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    This has nothing to do with the manufacturer.OPAL is a Specification from the Trusted Computing Group. – Jean-François Rioux Apr 05 '14 at 21:12
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    I also have an OPAL-compatible drive, and there is hardly any information that I could find about the best way to set one up. While this question *could* find a home on Superuser, I think SSDs with HW encryption are very relevant to the Security Stackexchange (and I do hope someone with the right experience see this and provides an answer). – scuzzy-delta Apr 06 '14 at 08:04
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    [From hardforum.com](http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=1e63ef76b7e791b6110d71aca1d39304&p=1040034564#post1040034564): _Self-encrypting harddrives are always encrypting and you cannot enable or disable this feature. Set a password on it to prevent unauthorized access. The password protects the key used by the device to encrypt/decrypt content. If you do not set a password, the drive is still encrypting but the key isn't' protected. The key used by the device can be regenerated by issuing a Secure Erase command which will also render any data currently on the drive unreadable._ – TildalWave Apr 06 '14 at 15:15
  • Also related: [Free/Libre software to handle TCG OPAL 2.0-compliant Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs)?](http://security.stackexchange.com/q/45542/20074) and a thread on Crucial Furum re [M500 hardware encryption with GNU/Linux](http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/M500-hardware-encryption-with-GNU-Linux/td-p/136243). – TildalWave Apr 06 '14 at 15:25
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    OP, look at this article, it provides some step-by-steps for setting up a SED password: http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Introduction-to-Self-Encrypting-Drives-SED-557/ – a coder Sep 03 '14 at 17:47
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    Migrating to Unix stack exchange would have been a better decision than simply closing the question. This is not a manufacturer or product support thing. OPAL and TCG are specifications (you know TPM?). I'm surprise security people here don't get this. – northox Mar 04 '15 at 17:32
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    I don't understand why this question was closed. This is not product support at all, and no useful information can be found online on what kind of software we can use to enable OPAL encryption. – Hey Jun 05 '16 at 16:15
  • That's funny. You know what manufacturer would say? We provide this kind of information under NDA to our enterprise clients only. I've tried to contact blue company to get datasheet of their datacenter ssd(available in retail), but they sent me off. But was able to google sheet for previous model. – Bogdan Mart Jun 21 '21 at 02:39

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