Samsung EVO SSD Hardware Encryption?

[fjnorb]

I have searched for this answer here but have found nothing on it.

Got a golden CustoMac Pro running with a 7200rpm SATA drive I had laying around. Build is based on the GA-Z87X-UD3H and the i7-4770K running 10.9.2. I know nothing about SSDs except that I want one, and Samsung EVO drives are very highly rated.

I also know that FileVault 2 does not work on Hackintosh boot drives. I am interested in my boot drive being encrypted however. Researching the Samsung EVO drives I have learned that they offer full-disk encryption in hardware.

Further research shows that setting a "hard disk password" in the BIOS somehow flips a switch on the EVO drive to encrypt itself. But I have zero experience with doing this. At least with FV2, you can look in System Preferences and see that the drive is encrypted. But since we can't FV2 boot drives on Hacks, it seems to be that a BIOS-based solution would encrypt the data and make the process transparent to OS X, giving me the best of both worlds.

But the manual for the Z87X-UD3H shows only an "Administrator" and "User" password in the BIOS Setup. Does that mean I can't run an EVO drive encrypted? (I assume there's Windows software to control the hardware encryption, which would be great if this wasn't a Hackintosh.)

Can anyone help me understand how the EVO hardware encryption works and if it can be used on this motherboard if I'm using it in a Hack? Thanks very much.

 

[Going Bald]

I have searched for this answer here but have found nothing on it.

Got a golden CustoMac Pro running with a 7200rpm SATA drive I had laying around. Build is based on the GA-Z87X-UD3H and the i7-4770K running 10.9.2. I know nothing about SSDs except that I want one, and Samsung EVO drives are very highly rated.

I also know that FileVault 2 does not work on Hackintosh boot drives. I am interested in my boot drive being encrypted however. Researching the Samsung EVO drives I have learned that they offer full-disk encryption in hardware.

Further research shows that setting a "hard disk password" in the BIOS somehow flips a switch on the EVO drive to encrypt itself. But I have zero experience with doing this. At least with FV2, you can look in System Preferences and see that the drive is encrypted. But since we can't FV2 boot drives on Hacks, it seems to be that a BIOS-based solution would encrypt the data and make the process transparent to OS X, giving me the best of both worlds.

But the manual for the Z87X-UD3H shows only an "Administrator" and "User" password in the BIOS Setup. Does that mean I can't run an EVO drive encrypted? (I assume there's Windows software to control the hardware encryption, which would be great if this wasn't a Hackintosh.)

Can anyone help me understand how the EVO hardware encryption works and if it can be used on this motherboard if I'm using it in a Hack? Thanks very much.

The EVO hardware encryption wil not work on a Mac AFAIK because the Mac EFI has no way to turn it on. Whether it will work in a PC-Mac is a matter for experimentation - maybe you can try it and let everyone know if it worked or not.
ECLYPT encrypted drives will work on a UEFI mainboard according to http://robert-palmer.net/2013/03/
and will also work on a Mac according to the article. They are a bit expensive though:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00GJV2OE4/?tag=tonymacx86-21

Unfortunately, they don't seem to be available in the US