Enable Hardware Encryption 970 EVO on 7506

@MasterMike123  The 970 Evo supports a variety of hardware encryption types, including Class 0 (which relies on an HDD password set in the BIOS), TCG/OPAL (used by enterprise applications), and BitLocker eDrive.  To my knowledge, Dell systems still don't support HDD passwords on NVMe SSDs, which if true would rule out using Class 0.  TCG/OPAL as I noted is typically only enabled by enterprise-oriented, centrally managed, disk encryption solutions.  As for eDrive, Microsoft switched to disabling BitLocker's support for relying on hardware encryption by default after security researchers found massive flaws in how multiple SSD vendors implemented their hardware encryption.  Here is one of many articles about that.  Granted that was a while ago and they didn't test a ton of SSDs, but they also found serious problems with 100% of the SSDs they checked.  So if that's the one you want to use, then you might have to jump through a few extra hoops these days.

But for multiple reasons, I would strongly encourage you to consider software encryption, using BitLocker or VeraCrypt if you don't have access to BitLocker and/or prefer open source solutions.  CPUs have had hardware acceleration for AES encryption/decryption operations for well over a decade now, which basically eliminates overhead even when dealing with fast NVMe SSDs.  And using software encryption will also make it VASTLY easier to recover data from that drive if you ever need to do that by installing it into another system or into an enclosure because your system died.

@MasterMike123  Forgot to add to the above that if your Samsung SSD isn't being detected by its bootable media, then it might be because your system is set to RAID mode rather than AHCI.  Check your BIOS.  Note however that changing that setting while you have an active Windows installation will render that existing installation unbootable unless you jump through some Safe Mode hoops.  That setting is normally meant to be switched just prior to reinstalling Windows.  But being in RAID mode would also prevent you from using Samsung's NVMe driver if you prefer to use that, fyi.  That too requires AHCI mode.

Hi,

I have replied to you from a private message.

-Gautam.

I was saying that I am unable to boot on the Samsung USB with the Secure Erase software on it.

Yes, I received a PM with the Hardware Encryption title. However, inside of it you are talking about my external monitor issue that I have with the laptop and not how to enable it or to boot on my USB flash drive with Samsung Secure Erase or something else. I can boot on a USB flash drive with windows on it, but that is about it...

My external monitor is obviously more important than this, but ya.

Hi,

We have an update. In order to identify the root cause, we first need to TS on the OS part. We will not be able to support an OS which is not shipped with the computer as this is not Dell provided. If you can install Windows 10 Home, we can start looking at the OS & drivers.

-Supriya