Crucial M550 SSD Encryption on nMP

[k-hawinkler]

I have an nMP with 1TB PCIe-based flash storage and a Crucial M550 1TB SSD that is advertised as a self-encrypting drive. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable copy of my internal boot drive onto the M550, including its recovery partition.

Question: How do I invoke the self-encryption feature of the M550? TIA.

 

[Weaselboy]

I have an nMP with 1TB PCIe-based flash storage and a Crucial M550 1TB SSD that is advertised as a self-encrypting drive. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable copy of my internal boot drive onto the M550, including its recovery partition.

Question: How do I invoke the self-encryption feature of the M550? TIA.

What Crucial is talking about there is that drive supports "hardware encryption." In other words the controller in the drive helps do some of the encryption work thereby taking that load off the CPU. Unfortunately, OS X does not use hardware encryption so this is of no use to you. This is an area Windows is ahead.

You can still encrypt the drive using OS X Filevault2 encryption, but this is all done in software by the OS.

If you want to encrypt your CCC clone, you will want to do that by creating an encrypted sparse bundle image following the instructions here.

You could encrypt the disk with Filevault2 then clone with CCC to the encrypted disk. The problem is, this disk would not be bootable if you ever wanted to boot from it to restore.

By using the encrypted sparse bundle image with CCC you can boot to the recovery partition on the second disk the from there use Disk Utility to open the encrypted bundle then clone the image back to your main drive with Disk Utility.

I know I just threw a lot at you there. If you need a hand setting this up, just let me know and I can help walk you through it.

 

[k-hawinkler]

What Crucial is talking about there is that drive supports "hardware encryption." In other words the controller in the drive helps do some of the encryption work thereby taking that load off the CPU. Unfortunately, OS X does not use hardware encryption so this is of no use to you. This is an area Windows is ahead.

You can still encrypt the drive using OS X Filevault2 encryption, but this is all done in software by the OS.

If you want to encrypt your CCC clone, you will want to do that by creating an encrypted sparse bundle image following the instructions here.

You could encrypt the disk with Filevault2 then clone with CCC to the encrypted disk. The problem is, this disk would not be bootable if you ever wanted to boot from it to restore.

By using the encrypted sparse bundle image with CCC you can boot to the recovery partition on the second disk the from there use Disk Utility to open the encrypted bundle then clone the image back to your main drive with Disk Utility.

I know I just threw a lot at you there. If you need a hand setting this up, just let me know and I can help walk you through it.

Many thanks indeed for the explanations and laying out my options.
So, please let me follow up and ask some more questions.

I could use Filevault2 on my internal drive and CCC to a backup drive.

Could I then boot from the backup drive?
Are there downsides using Filevault2?
For example, can CCC still do an incremental backup?

In the past I have used Filevault but typically eventually got it corrupted.
How robust is Filevault2 these days? Can one really depend on it?
Of course, I would have the backup, hopefully uncorrupted.

Thanks again.

 

[Weaselboy]

Many thanks indeed for the explanations and laying out my options.
So, please let me follow up and ask some more questions.

I could use Filevault2 on my internal drive and CCC to a backup drive.

Could I then boot from the backup drive?
Are there downsides using Filevault2?
For example, can CCC still do an incremental backup?

In the past I have used Filevault but typically eventually got it corrupted.
How robust is Filevault2 these days? Can one really depend on it?
Of course, I would have the backup, hopefully uncorrupted.

Thanks again.

Yes, you can still use CCC with FV2. Once you are logged in with a FV2 system, the disk looks the same to CCC and similar utilities and it copies like it normally would, incremental backups and all.

Myself and many others now use FV2 with no issues. It was pretty unstable back when it first came out with Snow Leopard, but seems very stable now.

First thing I do on any Macbook I buy is do a software update then turn on FV2. It is very transparent.