Hardware encryption on P4510 series drives?

[MSant21]

Hello,

I'm evaluating the Intel P4510 series drives for an application where we'll need encryption on Linux. I've ordered in a few 2TB drives, and was planning to kick the tires on hardware encryption to determine impacts to drive performance. The software implementations for encryption like LUKS2 will be too slow for my application.

Could you please confirm that the P4510 series support TCG Opal 2.0, as indicated on the product brief? The brief calls out TCG Opal 2.0, but has a footnote saying that all management features are not implemented, and alludes to them possibly being implemented after product launch. This marketing material is misleading at best.

If Opal 2.0 is not supported, what hardware encryption is supported, and could you please point me to instructions for setting it up? Thank you.

Regards,

Mike

[idata]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for posting in the Intel® communities.I understand that you would like to know if Opal 2.0 is supported in the Intel® SSD DC P4510 Series. Please let me investigate on this before confirming it to you. I'll post an update as soon as possible.Have a nice day.Regards,Diego V.

[idata]

Hi Mike,

I've got confirmation that Opal 2.0 is not supported in the Intel® SSD DC P4510 Series, however it will be supported in future releases. Currently the drives that support Opal are the ones from the Professional family: https://ark.intel.com/# @ProfessionalSSDs https://ark.intel.com/# @ProfessionalSSDsThe Intel® SSD DC P4510 Series has AES-256 encryption, but you would have to use a software to use this feature.I hope this information clarifies your concern.Have a nice day.Regards,Diego V.

[MSant21]

Hi Diego,

Thanks for your prompt response.

Do you have any information on software options to enable the hardware encryption on Linux? We do not need to boot off of an encrypted P4510 drive. Our use case is that we would have a different boot drive using LUKS2 software encryption, as we don't care about throughput on the boot drive. We would have several of the P4510 drives connected to the system for high-throughput and encrypted streaming writes / reads. We just need some way to set the hardware encryption key for the P4510 drives.

As a small footnote to supporting TCG Opal 2.0, the product brief[1] says that "All manageability features are not available at the time of the product release but will be available in future maintenance release. Please refer to product specification for details about feature description and availability." We're prepared to make a pretty large purchase of these drives if they can support TCG Opal 2.0 as advertised, or can at least be usable for hardware encryption of some sort on Linux. If the product roadmap requires an NDA, we are more than willing to sign that document. Otherwise, we'll have look around to other vendors to fill this need.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/dc-p4510-series-brief.pd... https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/dc-p4510-series-brief.pd...

Regards,

Mike

[idata]

Hi Mike,

I understand.Please let me investigate and see what I can find about this that may help you.I'll contact you back as soon as possible.Regards,Diego V.