Question Support for OPAL Full Disk Encryption

[FourTet]

Hi All!

I'm trying to figure out what are the requirements to enable an OPAL 1.0/2.0 drive to run the hardware-based self encryption.

I'm confused as some vendors say something on the line of "check with your system vendor", while some blog posts mention that OPAL is enabled by software (e.g. BitLocker) and there's no hardware requirement other than the drive supporting OPAL.

I would appreciate any clarification on this!

Thanks a lot,
FT.

 

[kerberos_20]

as far as i know, bitlocker uses software - CPU based encryption/decryption, but you can configure it to use hardware based encryption through group policy settings

Policy path	Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > BitLocker Drive Encryption > Fixed Data Drives
When enabled	Additional options can be specified that control whether BitLocker software-based encryption is used instead of hardware-based encryption on computers that don't support hardware-based encryption. It can also be specified to restrict the encryption algorithms and cipher suites that are used with hardware-based encryption.