Phison E18 (PNY CS3140 8TB) not detected as Opal-supporting

[rubin55]

I have a PNY CS3140 8TB PCIe4 NVME drive based on the Phison E18 controller. According to the spec sheet, this drive supports full end-to-end drive encryption, but sedutil-cli seems to disagree:

# sedutil-cli --scan
Scanning for Opal compliant disks
/dev/nvme0 No  PNY CS3140 8TB SSD                       CS314512

Is this drive not TCG Opal Compliant, or is it, but sedutil does not know about it yet?

[rodrigoaguilera]

I guess the opal support needs to be also supported by the vendor and not just the controller.

From that thread the Corsair MP510 has a phison PS5012-E12 which claims to have opal support in the controller spec sheet.

I have a MP600 PRO NH with a E18 and the situation is the same, the controller seems to support it but it is not enabled.
https://www.phison.com/en/ps5018-e18

Sad situation since the marketing from Corsair announces support for encryption.

[Blacklands]

In general, when looking for an SSD that supports OPAL, I would recommend to only consider those that either explicitly state support for it, or where you can find reports of other people that OPAL works on that particular drive. That's the only real indicators you can trust. If that isn't there, you're gambling on the support.

If it just says "encryption support", that can mean absolutely anything and nothing. Often that just means that the vendor's management software for their drives has some encryption feature, which might just be software encryption, or some proprietary thing.
And as @rodrigoaguilera says, you can't trust the hardware specs either. Maybe it's theoretically capable of OPAL encryption but not in practice.