[jlgaddis]

> ... and added a 240GB M500 SSD ...

This is a long shot but would you happen to know anything about the built-in encryption on this drive?

I bought the 480 GB version a few months ago to put in a new laptop and the primary reason I chose the M500 is because it is a "Self-Encrypting Drive". IIUC, third-party software is required to actually benefit from that -- but I'm not sure that I do understand correctly.

[rdl]

Yeah, it is standard Opal, but I just use FileVault 2. I find AES-NI supported FileVault performance to be more than adequate. I don't know of anything but Wave which does Opal key management for OSX, particularly for boot drives.

I use Fusion Drive with the 1TB drive I already had, too, so SED on just one of those drives wouldn't help.

[jlgaddis]

A very similar situation here, although I'm running Linux on this machine and not OS X. I feel that the SED stuff (while technically true) is misleading -- I specifically chose this drive over cheaper and better drives because of this feature. Lesson learned, though.

The only thing I could ever find for Linux that supported Opal was "SecureDoc for Linux" which, apparently, is impossible to get ahold of unless you're an enterprise with a fat bank account. Fortunately, like with FileVault, dm-crypt (which also leverages AES-NI) is more than sufficient for my needs.

Thanks for the reply.

[rdl]

It shouldn't be too hard to do a SED control utility fundamentally. It is maybe a licensing or TCG membership issue though. I thought it was just some extra drive commands.