How to enable Hardware Encryption on Crucial MX500 SSD?

Question

I have bought a 2 TB crucial MX500 SSD drive, and just installed it on a Windows 7 x64 machine, motherboard Gigabyte EP45-DS5 as a data drive.

Using the crucial Storage Executive software, I can see on the PSID Revert menu that the PSID revert cannot be triggered for the SSD drive and can read that the encryption is not supported on it. For the second drive (the system one, a standard HDD disk), I can read that that the command is not supported (not same words for the 2 disks).

and "The PSID recovery operation will be available when the disk meets all of the following conditions:
- Encryption is active on the disk. <-- the problem
- The disk does not contain any mounted partitions. <-- OK
- The disk is not connected to a RAID controller. <-- OK
- The disc is not a boot disc. <-- OK"

I have tried to create a partition, mount it, format it. Nothing helps me to have the encrypt mecanism active. I found nothing on the Crucial site (nor anywhere else) that helps me. Not a single word. The encryptions seems to be activated by default, with nothing to do to deal with it. I don't understand.

How can I know if the encrypt mecanism is active or not ? And how can I activate it or be sure to permanently deactivate it ?

Before writing tons of datas on that disk...

Answer 1

After doing some research and testing with a Crucial M500 I have, it appears that if the label includes a PSID then it is encrypted from the factory. If you perform a PSID reset, then the encryption is permanently deactivated. I have not contacted support regarding this, but after issuing the PSID reset, I now get an error stating that encryption is not supported on the drive.

Therefore, if you want to permanently deactivate the built-in encryption, I recommend issuing a PSID reset command from Crucial's Storage Executive tool. Note that this will make all existing data on the drive unreadable and will appear as a clean drive after the process completes.

Answer 2

We are using these drives at work, and I think perhaps you have a misunderstanding. Picture that you have an application that encrypts your drive. You encrypt it. When you boot up you are prompted for a password, you enter it, your drive boots up. Ok, now you find you have forgotten your password. Nothing you do will help you to get onto that drive. Everything is encrypted. You may as well throw it away. Well, that is what a PSID is for. It is a unique value for that drive, and it allows you to factory reset the drive. You will have lost all of your data, but you don't have to throw the drive away.

On the other hand, your drive may have a built-in hardware encryption engine on it. This is a nice feature that speeds up encrypting/decrypting, offloading the work onto the drive itself versus the CPU of your device. I believe it is up to the encryption software to hook into this capability. Bottom line, you do not turn on/turn off the hardware encryption engine of the drive via the low level tool that you use to recover the drive using a PSID.