macOS Tahoe verson 26.0.1 and external hard drive connected with USB

Owl-53 wrote:

ie : Samsung's T7, T7 Touch, and T9 portable SSDs are external drives that offer password protection with AES 256-bit hardware encryption.

Even it the encryption is at the hardware level, it's accessed via Samsung software that comes preinstalled on the drives (and can be re-downloaded from Samsung).

Having said that, if you format the drive when new it does not appear to leave any vestiges, small partitions, etc., it's just a clean slate.

Are we suggesting that Samsung uses Apple’s Secure Enclave on their portable SSDs? I get the concept of hardware encryption, but something has to manage the keys and incorporate something from the user to link it to them.

Put it this way – I erase a new Samsung SSD using DU, format it as unencrypted. When I connect it any Mac, it mounts and the data are accessible. If it’s hardware-level encrypted, that encryption is doing nothing to prevent access.

Note that Samsung states, “can be secured” not ‘is secured’. From what I can tell, Samsung’s software is required to manage the hardware encryption. That seems to be what’s causing problems for people relying on Seagate’s 3rd party encryption.

@neuroanatomist: thank you for the above, and for your considered and thoughtful response.

OK-I understand that my external drive is considered Third Party software. I also hear you re-"The first thing to do with a new drive is to erase and reformat it (at the top level) with Disk Utility". I always do.

My concern is that, because I've been using it for 1-2 years without any issues, it has a lot of data on it, so surely if I was to do anything to the drive itself *now*, my data would be erased. I may be misunderstanding the steps involved in "updated software on their website"-I hope it's something that I can install in Finder, or in Downloads, as opposed to on the external drive itself, because I can't actually access *anything* on the drive (I don't get that far) with my Macbook Air M2 (Tahoe). Having said that, I am going to see if this external drive is still readable and still works on my old laptop, which is at my office-my old laptop (2013) is "vintage" and doesn't have a lot of space left on it, so I need to sort that out before updating it to the next OS (not Tahoe)-it's still on an old OS. If my drive does work on my old laptop, I can only conclude that there *is* a compatibility issue between Tahoe and my external drive. As I said, I will follow this up with Seagate, hopefully tomorrow.

I hear you @owl-53 but how can it be that so many Apple customers are reporting the same issue? It can't be that we all have Seagate drives. I would assume others have other drives?

If We were to apply the concept of a Secure Enclave

We may think again ?

Secure Enclave