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    XPS 9350 and PM951: hw encryption not available on bios?

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by attila16881, Nov 16, 2015.

  1. attila16881

    attila16881 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hi Guys,

    I recently got a new XP9350 with the PM951 which is supposed to have hardware encryption which you can enable from the bios.

    The previous version, XPS 9343 had a different SSD but you had a way to set the disk password from the bios, enabling the mini SSD hardware encryption.

    Why is it not available on the newer model? Is it a feature disabled from the current bios or a bug? From the Samsung website specs, the AES hw encryption is present on all drives.
     
    attila16881, Nov 16, 2015
    #1
    hotnspicyjohnny likes this.
  2. hotnspicyjohnny

    hotnspicyjohnny Notebook Guru

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    Can anyone who owns a xps 13 simply check if edrive works?

    No body interested in a non-performance-loss encryption of their data?
     
    hotnspicyjohnny, Nov 18, 2015
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  3. dimsdale

    dimsdale Notebook Guru

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    Bitlocker uses the AES-NI instructions of the Skylake processors. That should take care of most of the encryption overhead. Would be interesting to see some benchmarks on encrypted vs non-encrypted drives on processors supporting AES-NI.
     
    dimsdale, Nov 20, 2015
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  4. hotnspicyjohnny

    hotnspicyjohnny Notebook Guru

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    On my Thinkpad Yoga (2013 - Intel 4th (i think so) I7) even the new AES-NI instruction set doesn´t really lower cpu usage. There is a reason why SSD producers built this into their drives.

    ~3-5% less battery life without TCG Opal.
     
    hotnspicyjohnny, Nov 20, 2015
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  5. attila16881

    attila16881 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Also, I would like to remember that all the Samsung SSDs and other major manufacturers include the hw encryption which can be easily turned on from the BIOS, and it was available in the early 2015 model (9343).

    Why remove such important feature from this high end device? All the other Dell laptops come with that option available!
     
    attila16881, Nov 24, 2015
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  6. hotnspicyjohnny

    hotnspicyjohnny Notebook Guru

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    Yeah maybe it would be the best thing if somebody with a xps 13 just looks it up, takes like 2 min..
     
    hotnspicyjohnny, Nov 24, 2015
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  7. hotnspicyjohnny

    hotnspicyjohnny Notebook Guru

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    Anything new about the hardware encryption of the pm951? Is there a way to set a ssd password?
     
    hotnspicyjohnny, Mar 1, 2016
    #7