Wizer wrote:
The drives encryption protects your data if someone removes the drive from the enclosure and connects to a motherboard. This encryption will prevent getting the data from the drive.
But then that someone just has to leave it in the enclosure, and take the data. That kind of protection is useless, unless there is a password.
One can chose not to use a password, for different reasons. And one can prefer to use, say, Bitlocker to protect their data (whatever the opinions about Bitlocker). Or one could simply want to use the drive as a simple external drive.
If someone doesn’t use a password, he/she expects the drive to be unencrypted.
Is there any information in the documentation about this encryption of data even in the absence of a password?
I’m not a Mac user, but on p.56 of the user manual, there is mention of a password to “encrypt the backup disk”, and then leaving the other option:
“If you do not want to create a password to encrypt your backup files…” (emphasis mine);
perhaps this is only Mac specific, but it does make one believe that without a password the data is unencrypted.
Even the product overview says: “WD Security utility allows you to set password protection and hardware encryption for your drive to help protect your files from unauthorized use or access.”
So we are led to believe encryption has to be setup, which would imply there would be no encryption otherwise.
Aaaanyway, reading a bit more about this situation and some of WD’s lines of externals, I see they won’t fix (or recognize) some “problem” they intentionally created.
At least, I presume the drive itself (probably a 3TB Green) could be reformatted and used normally in a dock outside the enclosure: it’s still cheaper than buying the drive itself. I’ll decide that later, before putting too much stuff on the unintentionally encrypted MyB Essential
Wizer wrote:
The thread that you refer to, shows user that had issues with the drives and the drives locked up. This could happen if the drives get corrupted or a firmware failure. However, this is not standard and has not happen to most of us here.
If you see the thread date it was 2 years ago
Eek! Well, it wasn’t that far in the forum, p.3 I think. But it does show the importance of leaving the data unencrypted if it was not demanded: one expects to be able to retrieve the data from the drive once it’s removed from a malfunctioning enclosure, when no password was given and smartware not installed.
(And if one asks why one would buy an external which features encryption, and not use that feature… well, I don’t see any other choice for a 3 TB external drive with USB 3.0 in their line of externals, and they all seems to have this forcible encryption without user consent.
They really should make that “feature” clear to customers.)
