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August 11th, 2017 10:00
Dell XPS 15 95602 HDD password in BIOS?
When i was ordering this laptop i was told that this laptops hard drive does support hardware encryption. I thought it would be as easy as setting the HDD Password in BIOS (like with some other SED SSD's)
I actually can't find HDD Password in BIOS anywhere.
Does this laptop come SSD capable of hardware encryption?
Thanks
Greg
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jphughan
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August 11th, 2017 16:00
Actually ejn63, there are some SSDs on the market whose built-in hardware encryption is initialized by setting a password on the disk in the BIOS. It's called "Class 0" encryption, and Samsung SSDs among others have supported it for a few years now.
Unfortunately, Dell systems do not support this feature on NVMe storage, only SATA storage. Not sure why, but here's the KB: <ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>
That said, CPUs are fast enough these days (and even include hardware-level acceleration for AES encryption/decryption instructions) that even a fast NVMe SSD shouldn't be bottlenecked by using software encryption like BitLocker. I personally also prefer the idea of using a more widely adopted (and better documented) encryption solution rather than a solution that's proprietary to the storage vendor and not well documented. Using software-based BitLocker also makes the storage more recoverable from another system if needed, whereas Class 0 relies on the the BIOS to support prompting for the disk password at boot.
ejn63
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August 11th, 2017 14:00
Hard drive encryption and a hard drive password are two separate things. Putting a password on the drive doesn't encrypt it -- that requires a utility to do (it's done under Windows).
Is this a single SSD or an SSD + hard drive?
greesha
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August 14th, 2017 07:00
Thank you,
That answers my question. Much appreciated.