Good news everyone! WD MyBook drives no longer contain "Hardware Encryption".

corrado33 · February 6, 2019

For years now we've battled with WD My Book drives that have some sort of "hardware encryption" on them so that if the drive were to be removed from the enclosure, it would not be readable by a normal computer. So basically, if the hardware inside the enclosure broke (but the drive was still fine) you'd be screwed.

I just purchased 2 WD MyBook drives, a 4 TB and a 6 TB. I was expecting them to be some sort of unlabeled WD drives (some online sources report a "WD White" drive), however, I was happily surprised. Despite both being cheaper than their naked drive counterparts on amazon.... both drives contained WD Blue drives manufactured within the last 5 months. So there goes the "they use old drives theory." Slightly less importantly, they no longer have hardware encryption on them, meaning that the enclosures can be reused as normal external enclosures without reformatting the drive. This actually surprised me. I've purchased probably a half dozen WD MyBook drives throughout the years, and EVERY single one of them had to be reformatted once removed from the enclosure due to their "hardware encryption." But these two drives were formatted as ExFat and worked both in the WD enclosure, and directly connected to my motherboard with no reformat.

Now, I'm not saying that their old hardware encryption was bad.... just slightly annoying for people who want to strip the drives, and another "single point of failure" for your data. Not only could the drive fail resulting in data loss, but the enclosure hardware could fail resulting in data loss, since the drive can no longer be read.

Anyway, just thought I'd share. If you want to buy a new drive.... buy the external one if it's cheaper!

EDIT: Dear WD rep who may or may not read this message. I have no idea WHY your external drives are cheaper than the bare drives.... but thanks for removing the hardware encryption.

Pickles von Brine · February 7, 2019

Yeah I use to deal with that crap quite often in my tenure as a recovery engineer. We tools that emulate the drive encryption or read the SED module from the drive. Handy but annoying. If you forgot to to enable decryption while you were imaging the drive the decryption process was... painfully slow.

Keep in mind even modern WD drives still use encryption and not enclosures use it. Good to see that in the module you have they don't.

cliffrick · January 8, 2020

On 2/6/2019 at 1:16 AM, corrado33 said:

For years now we've battled with WD My Book drives that have some sort of "hardware encryption" on them so that if the drive were to be removed from the enclosure, it would not be readable by a normal computer. So basically, if the hardware inside the enclosure broke (but the drive was still fine) you'd be screwed.

I just purchased 2 WD MyBook drives, a 4 TB and a 6 TB. I was expecting them to be some sort of unlabeled WD drives (some online sources report a "WD White" drive), however, I was happily surprised. Despite both being cheaper than their naked drive counterparts on amazon.... both drives contained WD Blue drives manufactured within the last 5 months. So there goes the "they use old drives theory." Slightly less importantly, they no longer have hardware encryption on them, meaning that the enclosures can be reused as normal external enclosures without reformatting the drive. This actually surprised me. I've purchased probably a half dozen WD MyBook drives throughout the years, and EVERY single one of them had to be reformatted once removed from the enclosure due to their "hardware encryption." But these two drives were formatted as ExFat and worked both in the WD enclosure, and directly connected to my motherboard with no reformat.

Now, I'm not saying that their old hardware encryption was bad.... just slightly annoying for people who want to strip the drives, and another "single point of failure" for your data. Not only could the drive fail resulting in data loss, but the enclosure hardware could fail resulting in data loss, since the drive can no longer be read.

Anyway, just thought I'd share. If you want to buy a new drive.... buy the external one if it's cheaper!

EDIT: Dear WD rep who may or may not read this message. I have no idea WHY your external drives are cheaper than the bare drives.... but thanks for removing the hardware encryption.