Use OPAL drive like a regular drive (D5-P5336 on Mac)

[mkush]

I have two D5-P5336 drives in use on my Mac and they are working great. I bought another one (used) but this one is OPAL. I do NOT care about the hardware encryption; I just want to use it as a normal drive. However, when I connect it to the computer, it does not ever present itself to the OS.

I have access to a Windows computer where I used the SST to update the firmware and do a secure erase. I tried running sst start -ssd <drive_index> -psidrevert <PSID> but received a message (sorry I did not write it down) that seemed to imply that the command didn't work because it wasn't necessary. I also noticed that in diskutil, the drive reported negative space available and I was unable to create a partition on it.

Long story short: is there a way I can just use this drive as a normal, non-OPAL drive on my Mac, given that I have access to the SST on a Windows computer to run any necessary commands?

[SolidigmGleb]

Hi  Mkush, 

Thank you for the update.

Since DiskPart clean results in that error and the drive disappears until the system is rebooted, please do not continue with further DiskPart cleanup or initialisation attempts for now. That behaviour is not expected for a normal partition cleanup and suggests we should review the drive status more closely.

We will reply directly to the case email that was opened for you. That will ensure the information and any attachments stay associated with your support case.

We will review the details you provide through the case and follow up with the next steps.

Best regards,

Gleb

Solidigm Support

[mkush · Accepted solution]

For the community, I wanted to post a followup. Gleb helped me via email and after a week of back-and-forth my drive is working.

So I can confirm that OPAL drives are just fine (running with OPAL off) on Macs.

My drive in particular had a different problem that prevented it from working on my Mac, or on Windows without a Solidigm driver: the LBA format was set to a strange setting. Once the drive was formatted to a more "normal" LBA setting, it is working perfectly on the Mac.

The command I ended up running (using Solidigm's SST tool on Windows) was:
sst start --ssd [index] --nvmeformat --LBAFormat 0 --SecureEraseSetting 2

This did not work on my normal Windows installation with the Solidigm driver, but it did work when booted into Windows PE. From there I connected the drive to my Mac and, poof, perfect functionality (whereas before it would not present itself to the OS at all).

Thanks Gleb.

[SolidigmGleb]

Dear Mkush,

Thank you for confirming that resolved the issue. This confirms our assessment that the issue was namespace/LBA-format related rather than an OPAL lock or hardware failure. The drive was previously using LBAFormat 3, which SST reported as 4096-byte sectors with 8 bytes of metadata per LBA.

Reformatting the namespace with SST to LBAFormat 0 moved the drive out of that metadata-bearing format, which explains why the drive now presents correctly.

This also explains why DiskPart, GPT initialization, and filesystem formatting did not resolve the issue: those operate inside the namespace, while the problem was the namespace’s active NVMe LBA format. The SST NVMe format command changed the namespace format itself.

Best regards,

Gleb

Solidigm Support

[mkush]

To get the command-line SST that I used in Windows PE, I just copied the folder out of Program Files on my normal Windows installation, onto a USB stick. On Windows PE I just ran it from the stick.