SSD Buying Advice

Kinda depends on what you want from "hardware encryption." Windows Bitlocker works on any fixed disk, to include a 40-pin IDE spinner retrieved from a 1990's era 386, or even one of those double-height slow/narrow SCSI 5.25" spinners from the 80's that weigh 10lbs. The same applies to Windows Encrypting File System. As such, are you intending to enable additional encryption mechanisms? And if so, do you have a specific hardware encryption standard you wish to see (FIPS-compliant is the typical ask.)

Pretty sure all of the Samsung Pro and EVO lines come with DRAM cache and support hardware encryption. I would also venture to guess DRAM-less drives will have lower warranties, as DRAM cache is there to manage wear leveling via write aggregation. As such, a good rule of thumb is probably to buy drives with a 5yr warranty, although I suppose this can't be guaranteed to give you a DRAM cache-enabled device.
I was under the impression bitlocker used hardware encryption features if they were available. Since I've never tried running bitlocker on a drive that doesn't support hardware encryption I don't know if it does anything different if the drive doesn't support it.

Okay I just looked it up and it seems bitlocker can use hardware encryption but maybe it doesn't by default. Lots of conflicting information about this.

This drive looks good for the price.
 
Yeah, modern Bitlocker can use physical disk encryption, depending on the drive / firmware support. I believe modern Bitlocker requires OPAL 2.0 compliance for this to work, and I've found a few places which seem to suggest your Solidigm SSD does not support the OPAL 2 spec. Maybe instead try the Silicon Power UD90, which does support OPAL 2 and is also a "budget friendly" but still reasonably performant drive?

And you're going to use this as a secondary disk right, not a boot drive?
 
Yeah, modern Bitlocker can use physical disk encryption, depending on the drive / firmware support. I believe modern Bitlocker requires OPAL 2.0 compliance for this to work, and I've found a few places which seem to suggest your Solidigm SSD does not support the OPAL 2 spec. Maybe instead try the Silicon Power UD90, which does support OPAL 2 and is also a "budget friendly" but still reasonably performant drive?

And you're going to use this as a secondary disk right, not a boot drive?
I might use it as a bitlockered boot drive at some point, but not for now. Why does it matter?
 
You'll need to make sure it's hardware BitLocked before you can then do a fresh install of an operating system. You can't migrate and you cant in-place BitLocker the drive if the OS is already on it, which is a crap limitation of the tech.
 
You'll need to make sure it's hardware BitLocked before you can then do a fresh install of an operating system. You can't migrate and you cant in-place BitLocker the drive if the OS is already on it, which is a crap limitation of the tech.
OK so right clicking the C drive and turning on bitlocker always does software encryption?
 
Correct. The only way to Bitlock a boot drive via hardware encryption support is to perform the encryption function from a Windows OS that is capable of hardware bitlocker, and then install a fresh Windows OS on the newly Bitlocked drive.

For "mere mortals" it's a pain in the ass; it's not really hard at all for anyone who does mass distribution by something like DISM from a Win2Go boot media (PXE at scale, USB on a 1:1 recovery basis.)
 
Correct. The only way to Bitlock a boot drive via hardware encryption support is to perform the encryption function from a Windows OS that is capable of hardware bitlocker, and then install a fresh Windows OS on the newly Bitlocked drive.

For "mere mortals" it's a pain in the ass; it's not really hard at all for anyone who does mass distribution by something like DISM from a Win2Go boot media (PXE at scale, USB on a 1:1 recovery basis.)
Okay I looked into it. Forget that. Obviously I've been using software encryption for years and never had a problem with it.
 
Well, that's really the trick right? So many people read about the "OMG PERFORMANCE LOSS" and, without ever really thinking it all the way through, freak out about how much slower their machine is. In reality, very few real world commodity / consumer applications will truly notice the difference. Bitlocker IS impactful to visible things like boot speed -- the fastest commodity / consumer machines will show up with the OS preloaded on a hardware-Bitlocked storage device for those extra few seconds shaved off your boot times. But if you've lived with it for this long, chances are you're not missing much.

In the datacenter encryption-at-rest space, it's all SED backed into either an enormous storage appliance (along the lines of a SAN or a NAS) or SED in a stripe and/or mirror array with an HBA that fully offloads it from whatever OS you lay on top. If someone steals one or all of the disks in a server, they're still 100% worthless without the server itself.
 
Well, that's really the trick right? So many people read about the "OMG PERFORMANCE LOSS" and, without ever really thinking it all the way through, freak out about how much slower their machine is. In reality, very few real world commodity / consumer applications will truly notice the difference. Bitlocker IS impactful to visible things like boot speed -- the fastest commodity / consumer machines will show up with the OS preloaded on a hardware-Bitlocked storage device for those extra few seconds shaved off your boot times. But if you've lived with it for this long, chances are you're not missing much.

In the datacenter encryption-at-rest space, it's all SED backed into either an enormous storage appliance (along the lines of a SAN or a NAS) or SED in a stripe and/or mirror array with an HBA that fully offloads it from whatever OS you lay on top. If someone steals one or all of the disks in a server, they're still 100% worthless without the server itself.
Software encryption it is. I'm not doing performance sensitive stuff on the encrypted drives.

Side note occasionally I'm had customers seemingly clear their TPM by accident and then they need the bitlocker key to boot. Two times this happened they didn't have the bitlocker key so they lost everything on the drive (I didn't turn on bitlocker for them so it wasn't my fault). How could such a thing happen? My theory is that since Windows Update will now deliver BIOS/UEFI updates, they ran updates and that caused the TPM to reset. But since all the data (logs) on the drives was lost, I can't say for sure what happened.

Side note #2 Active Directory does not back up bitlocker keys by default :cry:
 
No, a firmware update won't reset the TPM keystore. You have to be on a pretty pointed mission to reset the TPM keys, and the firmware WILL ask you at least once or twice if you're REALLY sure along with the dire warning about potentially losing all your data.

Also, had those people been backing up their workstation, they wouldn't have lost the data. The backups themselves are not linked to Bitlocker or EFS encryption, and as such could easily be restored on even the same machine after wiping and reloading the OS. Key takeaway: make backups, even if you aren't using encrypted storage ;)
 
No, a firmware update won't reset the TPM keystore. You have to be on a pretty pointed mission to reset the TPM keys, and the firmware WILL ask you at least once or twice if you're REALLY sure along with the dire warning about potentially losing all your data.

Also, had those people been backing up their workstation, they wouldn't have lost the data. The backups themselves are not linked to Bitlocker or EFS encryption, and as such could easily be restored on even the same machine after wiping and reloading the OS. Key takeaway: make backups, even if you aren't using encrypted storage ;)
It's really strange then. I dunno how that could happen. I think it is possible to clear the TPM from Windows but there's no way they would have done that.

Anyway they don't store data on these laptops so there's no need to back them up. Only reason they are encrypted is because of saved passwords and stuff. When I say they lost everything on the drive I just mean I had to reinstall the OS.
 
Yeah, Windows Defender can do it for you. It's a little bit buried, and it too warns you very specifically about losing ALL your encrypted data unless you have the keys backed up.
 
Does that mean I could steal a drive put it in my pc, run a backup and the encryption will be removed from the backup ?
It's kinda hard to understand, but the encryption doesn't really exist for you.

One way to understand this is to consider BitLocker to work like an incredibly durable safe, and inside that safe you have your very important documents. When the safe is locked, the documents can be considered secure from pilfering by anyone but the most determined US government agency (I'm presuming somehow the CIA or DHS or whoever has convinced MS to give them some sort of uber-key, but who really knows?)

You can't make copies of those documents until you unlock and open the safe. In BitLocker terms, you need the keys which are stored in the cryptographic key store embedded physically within the TPM chip on your system board to unlock the disk. However, once the safe is opened / the disk is unlocked, you now have free reign to do what you want with the contents. If your house is on fire, and you've left the safe open, the safe cannot protect your documents from being burnt up. If you've powered your machine and Bitlocker has successfully unlocked the disk with the TPM keys, the data is now available to be accessed by anything. That could be backups, it could be file copies, it could be malware or ransomware, it could be spies from another country. Bitlocker only protects the contents of the drive from attacks which depend on attacking the drive itself from another OS (sideloading the disk onto another PC, or booting your PC with external media.

There are other encryption mechanisms built into Windows, the next layer of which is Encrypting File System (EFS, a feature of modern NTFS which came along in Windows 2000.) In this scenario, the files themselves are encrypted with a user's private certificate, so even if the OS is booted and Bitlocker is now unlocked, the individual user-specific files themselves cannot be read unless the specific user is actively logged in. EFS doesn't encrypt the ENTIRE file system, it only encrypts specific areas such as C:\Users\<username> and similar user-specific sections. This is because encrypting common binaries with a user-specific cert may cause the machine to be unusable, as even the OS itself does not have access to the user's personal keystore (at least, not until the user logs in.)

But yet again, if the OS is booted then Bitlocker is no longer a blocker, and if the specific user is logged in then EFS is no longer a blocker. Again, malware (running in the user's context) could attack literally every piece of data in the user's profile, even those with EFS enabled, because it's acting with that user's encryption certificate. Also, EFS is not available / applicable for network shared storage; it's only local. If you copy an EFS-encrypted file to a network share, the OS will warn you that the file will become decrypted at the other end.

Now, a Windows OS backup solution running in the OS / kernel context can still back up EFS files, they'll just be useless unless you have the user's encryption cert. And along those lines, if you're backing up the ENTIRE PC and all the contents therein, you're getting the user's certificate store as part of the backup. As such, the backups will still contain all the EFS-encrypted files, and would restore them back from whence they came, but still wouldn't necessarily be able to make any sense of the data it had stored.

So, if you're REALLY paranoid about your files, then don't stop at BitLocker. Make sure to use a strong authentication mechanism, use the Encrypted File System for your local files, and perhaps think twice about putting anything you're worried about on a network share (eg NAS.)
 
Does that mean I could steal a drive put it in my pc, run a backup and the encryption will be removed from the backup ?
You'd need the bitlocker key to unlock the drive. Once you have that you can do whatever you want.

My understanding is that normally the key is stored in the TPM so you don't have to enter it every time you use the drive. Once you move the drive to another computer I assume you'd have to enter the key every time unless you turned bitlocker off and on again in the new PC.

Edit: and it seems there is a command you can run to copy the key to the TPM of the new mobo, so you don't have turn turn bitlocker off and on:
 
You're correct about the full Bitlocker key being stored in the TPM, and also able to be keyed in at a prompt if the drive is side-loaded by another OS.

Also, don't confuse the Bitlocker key itself from the optional Bitlocker PIN requirement which some enterprises use. This is an additional layer of security where the user must enter a PIN to unlock the TPM keys, which then unlock the BItlocked drive.
 
You're correct about the full Bitlocker key being stored in the TPM, and also able to be keyed in at a prompt if the drive is side-loaded by another OS.

Also, don't confuse the Bitlocker key itself from the optional Bitlocker PIN requirement which some enterprises use. This is an additional layer of security where the user must enter a PIN to unlock the TPM keys, which then unlock the BItlocked drive.
I didn't know about the PIN thing. I understand why that's good but kind of redundant since the Windows accounts have passwords. You can't do anything without the Windows password and it can't be cracked since the drive is encrypted.
 
You're not thinking like a hacker.

If you can boot the OS, you can attack the OS while it's running, for example from the network interface.
 
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