Warning: Intel Rapid Storage Driver and Bitlocker

[Stargate199]

So I am posting my experience so that it might inform someone else if they run into this issue. Here we go.

Okay, so first I bought a new Samsung 850 EVO SSD for my T450s instead of having it installed from the factory to save a bunch of money. I did a clean install of Windows 10. Now a feature of the 850 series of SSDs (along with many current ones on the market) is that they support the eDrive standard. Simply put they have on board encryption chips so you can encrypt your drive without impacting performance. Bitlocker since Windows 8.1 (and maybe Win8) will utilize this hardware encryption. Windows 10 does support this, but apparently Microsoft implements Bitlocker in a slightly different fashion than in 8.1

So here is what happened, I encrypted my drive using BitLocker. I ran Lenovo update and it said there was an update to the Intel Rapid Storage driver. I went ahead and updated. Everything appeared to work fine, until my computer went to sleep. When the computer came out of sleep, the system would blue screen. Apparently the Intel driver for some reason will not decrypt the drive properly when coming out of sleep. I did a system restore back to before I did the drive update and all is fine, just like it was. The system was and now is using the Microsoft SATA AHCI driver that ships with Windows 10.

I was using the latest driver (posted on the Lenovo site mid December, but the version was the same as on the Intel site). I had heard that older versions of the Intel driver were not compatible with BitLocker on Windows 10, but it was said the latest version was okay. I did this research before I got the computer and when I did the clean install I thought I was running with the Intel Driver.

Bottom Line: If you are going to use BitLocker with an eDrive compatible SSD on Windows 10, uninstall the Intel Rapid Storage driver and use the default Microsoft one. I really can't tell a performance difference between the Intel and Microsoft driver in day to day so its fine.

This problem is not present on Windows 8 from my research

Also I found this quite funny that on the Intel forums (on the actual Intel website), Intel even says to use the Microsoft drivers. Hopefully Intel will fix this in the near future.

Hope someone finds this useful.