Can you disable SED protection on a enterprise drive for hardware level RAID?

[Thatguywiththetoasterpc]

As the title says, is it possible to disable SED functionality for a RAID 0 setup? I got my hands on 2 3TB Constellation ES.2 SED drives from a buddy that are brand new. But i don't care about the Encryption honestly I just want speed for my less played games.

[Oshino Shinobu]

From what I can find, you should be able to disable it, as it's part of the process of changing the password. That said, I don't know if this is applicable for all drives or not. 

 

There's an article here for doing it through Linux:

 

https://www.techspot.com/guides/869-self-encrypting-drives/#disable

[Eigenvektor]

Since encryption is done at the hardware level, it's performance penalty is probably negligible to zero. You're most likely not going to get noticeably better performance by disabling it.

 

~edit:

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/constellation-fam/constellation-es/constellation-es-2/es-es/docs/100633157h.pdf

Quote

 

5.1 DATA ENCRYPTION

Encrypting drives use one inline encryption engine for each port, employing AES-256 data encryption in Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode to encrypt all data prior to being written on the media and to decrypt all data as it is read from the media. The encryption engines are always in operation and cannot be disabled.

 

 

[Thatguywiththetoasterpc]

4 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Since encryption is done at the hardware level, it's performance penalty is probably negligible to zero. You're most likely not going to get noticeably better performance by disabling it.

 

~edit:

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/constellation-fam/constellation-es/constellation-es-2/es-es/docs/100633157h.pdf

 

Yeah I get that part. I wasn't to worried about the Encryption effecting performance by itself, I just saw an article saying SED doesn't work in raid for whatever reason.

[Thatguywiththetoasterpc]

Ignore this comment

Edited June 30, 2020 by Thatguywiththetoasterpc

[Thatguywiththetoasterpc]

4 hours ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

From what I can find, you should be able to disable it, as it's part of the process of changing the password. That said, I don't know if this is applicable for all drives or not. 

 

There's an article here for doing it through Linux:

 

https://www.techspot.com/guides/869-self-encrypting-drives/#disable

Ok cool, I look into the article. I got these thinking well at least they're super secure, even though they're slow. But I don't want them if I can't even do RAID 0 lol

[Eigenvektor]

4 hours ago, Thatguywiththetoasterpc said:

Yeah I get that part. I wasn't to worried about the Encryption effecting performance by itself, I just saw an article saying SED doesn't work in raid for whatever reason.

The document I linked to simply says "Seagate recommends validating your configuration with the selected HBA/RAID controller manufacturer to ensure full 3TB capacity capabilities." which would indicate that RAID should work.

 

I found a document by HP that says SED requires AHCI mode and using RAID makes it impossible to use key management tools. But the drive itself should work, only you can't control encryption when using them in a RAID array.

[Thatguywiththetoasterpc]

On 6/30/2020 at 11:36 PM, Eigenvektor said:

The document I linked to simply says "Seagate recommends validating your configuration with the selected HBA/RAID controller manufacturer to ensure full 3TB capacity capabilities." which would indicate that RAID should work.

 

I found a document by HP that says SED requires AHCI mode and using RAID makes it impossible to use key management tools. But the drive itself should work, only you can't control encryption when using them in a RAID array.

Thanks that actually helped a ton. I had originally thought would be how things would work but I saw some conflicting info on it. Now I gotta figure out how to actually get hardware level raid working on this dumb MSI Bios lol