Plextor M5M Encryption?

I have a 128GB Plextor M5M mSATA SSD in my system, but I have no idea how to work with the encryption engine built onto it, specifically with Bitlocker. Supposedly the M5M it has hardware AES-256 bit support, but when I turned on bitlocker on my system (In AES-256 bit mode enabled via Group Policy, with TPM), I got the usual software encrypting window and it took around 20 minutes to complete encryption of the volume. I just realized lately that Bitlocker can leverage the hardware encryption of some drives with eDrive compatibility like the crucial M500, but I haven't been able to find a definitive list of supported drives for this either.

It appears that hardware-enabled bitocker is faster than that of software Bitlocker, which is why I'm interested. Any comments would be appreciated

 

I have an 512gb M5pro Extreme with 256 bit encryption that i have yet to try, i have heard that some bio`s have an encryption option my bios does not, , if it does not you will need software like the bitlocker you mentioned.

John.

 

Here is a review of eDrive performance on the M500. The performance impact of hardware-enabled Bitlocker vs software-enabled Bitlocker is quite large.

The 20 minutes encryption was mere seconds with eDrive.

AnandTech | Hardware Accelerated BitLocker Encryption: Microsoft Windows 8 eDrive Investigated with Crucial M500

Crucial M500
Samsung 840 EVO firmware update enables eDrive
Lenovo has a 256GB eDrive SSD. Who makes it, I wonder? Samsung, Lite-ON (Plextor)

 

The hardware encryption of the Plextor drive is always enabled. I just don't know if it will work with any third party utilities such as the Bitlocker; I haven't been able to find much information on what exactly eDrive is or a list of supported drives either.