i bought a WD passport 1Tb extenal hard drive a year ago. initially i formatted it in my mac according to instructions posted on the community forum and all is working well. i remembered that when i had bought the drive it offerred password protection and encryption. however, after all this time, when i decided i wanted to password protect my drive, i cannot find any icon/ software on it that lets me do so. does the drive lose its password protection and encryption when formatted on mac? at the time of formatting i had done the needful as i use a mac at home and pc at work.
if i had to buy another external hard drive fo rmy wife, who has a similar situation (mac at home and pc at work), should i buy the ones specifically designed for mac? they all seem to be usb 3.0. are these compatible with usb 2.0?
USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 as an interface. However, actual physical compatibility relies on the USB port supplying enough power to feed the hard drive.
The actual process to trigger/enable encryption and the software involved depends on the hard drive model. If it’s a 1st Gen. WD SmartWare drive then you will be able to encrypt the drive by means of WD SmartWare. However, 2nd Gen. SmartWare drives onwards use a separate dedicated tool for encryption called WD Security. The Model Number of the hard drive will allow you to identify hard drive generations.
You can download WD SmartWare from the following link:
