WD's 'My Book' 6TB findings...

[Elixer]

Saw this sucker on clearance for $100 (was at Target), so, got it, and after formatting & testing it for 24 hours this is what I find.

It is a Blue labeled drive inside.
On the box, there is NO mention of 'always on' encryption.
They DO mention about their WD security software with "password access & hardware encryption". (Makes you think that the user can enable/disable it. That is NOT the case, you can't turn off the hardware encryption.)

The easiest way to open these suckers without breaking the tabs is in this video. Yeah, that easy.

With the WD security software NOT installed, I wrote a few test files to the 'My Book', then when that was done, plugged the HD into a external to see what it would do in Windows & linux.
Window's Disk Management just said it was a GPT protected partition and you have no options at all to do anything with the HD. Everything was ghosted out.
On linux, doing a dd dump of the first ~200MB of data showed nothing of value, it was all random, so, the hardware encryption is working.
I had another WD 'My Book' controller pcb, and I tried that one on the new HD, couldn't even read it either.

In short, your are SOL if the controller board fails. Must take it to the pros.
The "security software" is pretty pathetic as well.

This is such a dumb move by Western Digital, and nobody should be buying these things if they don't plan on using their own enclosure or making it an internal HD.
I bet if they clearly advertised that these units all had always on hardware encryption, and the ramifications of that, hardly anyone except clueless people would be buying them.

 

[deustroop]

thx for the heads up.

 

[Shmee]

Pretty sketchy. Shame.

 

[jkauff]

I have eight My Book drives. I didn't worry too much about the encryption, because the drives were so inexpensive I'd replace any that developed problems (only one has so far). Needless to say, all the data is duplicated elsewhere so I can easily restore it to the new drive.

The idea of the encryption, though, made me mad. I now buy large-capacities Seagates. Seagate reportedly has cleaned up their QC in the last couple years, and these drives are working fine so far. They're noisier than the WDs, but since they're used for storage only that's not a big deal.

I was hoping a consumer backlash would force WD to drop the interface encryption, but most people aren't even aware of it. Too bad, because I like the MyBook line.

 

[Maiyr]

Well I hate to announce myself as the "clueless" one here, but what is the issue with the encryption? I currently have two of these in use. One as a media drive attached to my HTPC and another as a tertiary off site backup for everything. Am I doing something wrong or am I somehow in jeopardy?

Thanks,

Maiyr

 

[Elixer]

The issue is, if the controller board on the unit dies out, your data can't be recovered by you sticking the drive in another unit/machine.
Instead, you will have to pay $800+ for a professional recovery service to try and salvage the key off of the PCB. If they can't do that, then....you are screwed.

Since you have tertiary backups (which is actually quite good), in your case, not much for that drive, except for the HTPC unit, unless you don't care about losing all those shows on it.

 

[Maiyr]

Ah ok, I see. Yeah that does suck and I would have expected to be able to plug the drive in as you say. Seeing as I have three copies of everything important (one off site) I think I am safe for now, but I will look for another solution going forward. Thank you for the heads up. Honestly this is the reason I have avoided one of those cool little NAS units because I didn't like the fact that I couldn't pull a drive out and stick it in another PC to read my data (at least not without some work and maybe booting linux). And hear I am in the same situation anyway. LOL.

Maiyr

 

[nopainnogain]

Thanks for the warning.