It's genuinely interesting to hear this is the case. I mean, I don't disagree with you that it's important to have out in the open regardless. But I honestly ju

It's genuinely interesting to hear this is the case. I mean, I don't disagree with you that it's important to have out in the open regardless. But I honestly just assumed from the start that Opal would just generally be a badly implemented feature checkbox not something dependable. For this case of crypto code it didn't seem trustworthy if it wasn't open, standard and trivially auditable. Unlike Apple for example these products don't have the kind of marketshare, clear public profile and constant open as well as covert attacks that would be necessary to grant a higher degree of confidence despite being closed, the barrier needs to be lower given the lower profile. So I've never used the hardware crypto in any SSD, it's always been through software on top, although in fairness that has become easier to do as AES-NI has become more universal in CPUs. That has given a lot of the assurance and speed of a dedicated hardware crypto chip while still using higher level software. I guess in retrospect it's quite reasonable most people would trust it, or for that matter not think about it at all but rather trust Microsoft or whomever to be getting that right for them and that checking the FDE Box in the GUI would mean what it said. A good example of having personal blinders on for me, I'm too used to just ignoring Opal entirely since the day it was introduced.