Thanks for posting the additional info and attempts at getting specifics from the manufacturers. It appears there is a bit of a catch-22 going on in that Asus response
Well I started to realize that even if I somehow got the BIOS hdd password setup working on another mobo, I don't think the current generation of hardware encryption offers the features I need for what I am trying to do. namely, having some way to enter the password while in windows, unrelated to the BIOS.
So I started looking at software encryption again. Previously I had tested software encryption only using SSDs and USB3 enclosures and there was a pretty significant performance hit (plus USB3 already had shitty randoms).
I tested again yesterday with the SSD installed in the SATA hot swap bays.
First I tested TrueCrypt AES. TrueCrypt wouldn't run with AS-SSD but CrystalDiskMark showed me I was getting great reads, but horribly broken write speeds (everything capped at 60mb/s???). Must've been some weird driver issue with the way TrueCrypt mounts the volume on my PC, since the speeds were much slower than USB3 encrypted.
So then I tried DiskCryptor which uses a different mounting method. I tested AES and Serpent.
Now my baseline 840pro AS-SSD score without any encryption is 1009.
With DiskCryptor and AES, the score is 1008.
With DiskCryptor and Serpent, it was 960 or so (don't have that one saved).
So the DC software encryption is basically free on my PC (I'm sure I pay some minor CPU cost though I need to test for that also). The randoms are incredibly fast and that's what really matters for me for my usage scenarios (rebuilding a shader cache library can take forever because of tons of small random reads of shader code all over the place).
So looks like until things change with how hardware encryption is implemented and presented to consumer users, I will be using software encryption again.
Also FWIW, I ended up needing to rely on a 3rd party utility to make hot-swapping work with my SSD (and by "work" I mean give the option to safely eject the drive using the taskbar icon). There's a win7 bug where in RAID or AHCI mode, your drives don't show up in the "safely remove hardware" list no matter what you do. A little utility called "hotplug.exe" however seems to perfectly replicate the same functionality so you can pull the SSD without worrying if its mid-GC.
Also probably done trying different software encryption methods since I have done at least 3 full disk writes just to test this stuff
