[SOLVED] External Samsung SSD encryption

[maxwin]

Hi,

I have a samsung 970 Evo plus SSD and an external Orico USB box. I was going to use it as an external SSD and I wanted to use hardware encryption. But Samsung Magician does not recognize my external SSD. After some googling I found out that it is a known problem. For example this thread discusses this issue:

Samsung Magician with USB to SATA cable?

I have a Samsung 840 EVO installed in my laptop and another Samsung 850 PRO that I connected as an external drive with this USB to SATA cable. The internal drive is all right. Even the external drive is recognised and operable through the OS (Windows 7). However, the Samsung Magician software...

forums.tomshardware.com

It says that Samsung Magician does work when using a thunderbolt enclosure.

Is there any current solution to this problem? What's the best way to use an external SSD with hardware encryption? Should I buy a thunderbolt box or maybe there's some third-party software that allows to enable the encryption without Samsung Magician?

Thank you.

PS. I'm aware that Samsung also has its own external SSDs T5, T7 etc, but I was wondering if I could use the SSD I already bought.

 

[USAFRet]

I don't think Magician will work with any external USB thing.

The hardware encryption on Samsung drives is pretty substandard.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/crucial-samsung-ssd-encryption-bypassed,38025.html

I know you're looking for hardware encryption, but what about VeraCrypt?

 

[maxwin]

Thank you for your suggestion, USAFRet.
I do know about this particular problem of Samsung hardware encryption. My hope was that Samsung eventually solved this problem.
I did consider VeraCrypt and BitLocker, but eventually I wanted to try hardware encryption, because it has 0 overhead. I was planning to use this external SSD with my laptop. And even if software encryption does not significantly decrease performance of SSDs, it still uses CPU to do the decryption, which I would rather try to avoid.
Besides, if you want to be really paranoid you can use both: hardware and software encryption.