We have a My Cloud EX4 in our company which is used as our primary NAS. For the purpose of doing regular external backups with encryption support we are considering My Passport Ultra. However, what we are curious about is if the advanced features of this external storage, especially encryption, require a Windows/Mac host in order to work?
In other words, is it possible for this device to behave as an encrypted external storage without the need to be connected to a Windows/Mac machine? Additionally, would any configuration of the device made on a Windows/Mac machine (through supplied WD tools) be retained when connected to a host which is not Windows/mac driven (i.e. the aforementioned NAS storage)?
At this moment, the WD Passport Ultra requires a physical host computer with administrative privileges in order to unlock/disable the encryption system. The WD My Cloud EX4 does not feature options to bypass or unlock encrypted devices.
First of all, the WD locker “encryption” is just the usb link encryption, using a proprietary interface. The data itself is not encrypted, or else it’d take hours to do a simple lock/unlock on drives with data > 500gb
So if you want encrypted link, unlock it transfer the data and lock it again using a pc or mac. If you really want encrypted data, the correct approach is to use data encryption tools like truecrypt.
