How to activate Bitlocker with hardware encryption on SSD on partitioned drive

Question

I want to have my SSD drive full-disk encrypted using the SSD hardware encryption through bitlocker. I have enabled encryption on the SSD, but windows does not use the hardware encryption.

What I have:

• Samsung SSD 840 EVO with and Samsung magician says the drive encryption is enabled (so in my understanding all data should already be encrypted, but the key is 'public').
• I have three partitions on the drive:
  • the windows recovery partition
  • the windows partition c:
  • and a data partition d:
• Bitlocker looks like this (ie I can only choose to enable encryption on a partition not a drive)
• 
• I have newest Intel RST driver though I'm not sure thats relevant: v13.6.0.1002
• I have a TPM chip installed, and it seems windows accepted the chip, after i fixed my master boot record (acronis probably modified it)
• I can enable bitlocker encryption on the drives, but it encrypts in software (it takes long time encrypting after reboot, so therefore I assume its software, plus I see the question fulldisk encrypt or used space encrypt which means it software according to helgeklein blog)

So 

• Is it possible to use hardware encryption when the drive is partitioned like this?
• Any input as to debug it or how to enable bitlocker hardware fulldisk encryption?

Best Alex

Answer 1

Hi Alex,

Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community.

Your question is beyond the scope of what is typically answered in this consumer forum and would be better suited for the IT Pro audience on TechNet.

Please post your question in the TechNet Forums.

Hope this information is helpful. Please feel free to reply in case you face any other issues with Windows in future.

Answer 2

Hi Niranjan ,

Thank you for the reference to Technet forum, I appreciate it. I found most of my answers in technet 

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn486875.aspx

and 

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn641993.aspx

In short, it was possible, and I needed an UEFI windows install partition (and I had to upgrade to windows 10 to get around a missing bitlocker but I think that was a win8 bug I ran into).

More info here https://helgeklein.com/blog/2015/01/how-to-enable-bitlocker-hardware-encryption-with-ssd/

Best Alex