Enable hardware encryption Samsung 850 EVO

I did some further research.

The original number quoted from Wikipedia must be out-of-date, because other sources claim a negligible hit in performance with FileVault2, even when being applied to a mechanical hard drive. I assume the Wikipedia article was referencing the performance of FileVault2 on a machine that doesn't use a more recent Intel processor. The reason I assume that is because apparently FileVault2 now takes advantage of hardware acceleration offered by Intel processors for the software encryption process. This is for Macs that use an Intel processor from 2010 and later; as is discussed in these three links:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/105320/does-filevault-encryption-slow-r ead-write-access-on-an-ssd

FileVault2 Performance

http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/10/filevault-2-benchmarks-disk-encryption-faster-mac -os-x-lion/

There's still a downside to using FileVault2 over hard drive facilitated encryption; though, which is a vulnerability to hackers retrieving the encryption password from the memory of a Mac that is still powered on. This info is from an article published in 2012, so maybe Apple has patched that vulnerability by now? I didn't see any mention of that, though.

https://www.cnet.com/news/filevault-2-easily-decrypted-warns-passware/

In the mean time, a way to account for that vulnerability would be to always power down the Mac when not near it instead of allowing sleep mode.

https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/03/apple-filevault-2-encryption-cracked-but-don t-panic/

So although there's probably negligible difference in performance between hardware encryption and FileVault2, there still seems to be better security with the hard drive's hardware-based encryption.

All of this info ultimately leads back to the original question. How does one go about accessing the UEFI/EFI on a Mac and enable the hardware encryption of the hard drive?

Hi,

That's a good question.

Apparently with FileVault's software mediated encryption, "the I/O performance penalty for using FileVault 2 was found to be in the order of 20 – 30% when using CPUs with the AES instruction set, such as the Intel Core i and OS X 10.7.^[14][15] Performance deterioration will be larger for CPUs without this instruction set, such as older Core CPUs."

So in other words, if the hard drive is encrypting the data (instead of the OS) by using dedicated hardware that encrypts faster than the drive can read and write, then the encryption process no longer acts as a performance bottleneck. Seeing as how the whole point of getting a solid state drive was to remove read/write speeds as a bottle neck in performance, it would be kind of silly to re-introduce that bottleneck, even if it is marginal in comparison to the performance penalty incurred by using a mechanical hard drive.

I called Samsung, and the tech support representative said that one can enable the encryption protocol by accessing the BIOS or EFI/UEFI and assigning a password to the hard drive. The representative also said that because Apple is the computer manufacturer, Apple has the responsibility of helping the customer to navigate to the correct configuration page in the EFI/UEFI to enable the hardware encryption of the drive.

So, how exactly do I do that?

Hopefully someone here knows.