Samsung PM981a support?

[imaginifer123]

Hello, I have Samsung PM981a NVMe drive installed in a PCI-e adapter card. I've tried several forks of the sedutil but all show that the drive does not support TCG OPAL, even the rescue disk of this fork did so.

It is complicated to find out any relevant documentation for the Samsung drive on the internet, but the scarce finds suggest that the OPAL should be supported. Any ideas why it's not working?

[ChubbyAnt]

The PM981 is an OEM drive, and it appears that many variations were made for different OEMs.

Does yours have a PSID number on the label? If yours does not have a PSID number on the label, then it is probably not OPAL.

[Uloque]

Well, @ChubbyAnt, as this is an ongoing issue, I have to add that the Samsung PM981a (NOT 981) is in fact an OPAL 2.1 drive. The official 'name' of my drive is MZVLB512HBJQ-000L7. I have a system with AMD's Ryzen Mobile chipset. I tested basic functionality of three sedutils under Windows 10 Pro build 21H2.

The 'Bright Plaza' sedutil

from https://github.com/Drive-Trust-Alliance/sedutil/wiki/Executable-Distributions does recognize this drive and shows part of the model ID and its fw-revsion.

The scan takes just a few seconds.

\.\PhysicalDrive1 2 SAMSUNG MZVLB512 EXF7

Your "ChubbyAnt-fork"

does not recognize the drive at all, not even showing its name.
This sedutil takes some minutes to end its scan and leaves the user with just:

\.\PhysicalDrive1 No

And that is surely not correct. The drive's capabilites are not recognized at all.

The oom-is build

takes a guru meditation of a minute or two, before the result shows up:

\.\PhysicalDrive1 2

That's all it tells me. At least it correctly reports the drive's OPAL-2-capability.