WD Elements Play 2TB HD = Dead - Simple Question

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

Hi.
My 2TB WD Green HD in my WD Elements Play device, went dead just pass warranty (go figure).
Tried to connect it to my PC, and Isolate the bad sectors to try and save my data, thing is after a few restarts, since the drive would stop working, it completely went dead. My Windows won’t even start if the drive is connected in the PC, it’s how bad it is… I heard somewhere, that WD encrypts data so it dies and you have to pay to recover it… you know something you really have to figure out yourself. The thing is I don’t want to recover it, I want to buy a new 3TB hard drive and connect it to my WD Elements Play device.

It’s a 3TB HD, SATA 3. My only question is… Will it work in my WD Elements play device? I don’t want to go buy an HD and then return it cause it won’t serve my purpose, so let’s just turn thing easier.

Thank you in advance.

2

NFM18 wrote:

I heard somewhere, that WD encrypts data so it dies and you have to pay to recover it…

Nonsense.  Data are only encrypted on drives that support hardware encryption.   None of the WD Green drives do that.  AFAIK, it’s only done on some USB drives, and certainly not all.   I know of no desktop or laptop form-factor drives from WD that are encrypted.

As long as you’re using the same product line (WD Green, basically) it should work fine.   If I recall on the Elements Play, the firmware is stored in flash memory, not on the drive itself.  So a new, out-of-the-box drive should be fine.

But I certainly won’t say that ANY drive would work.  The firmware may prevent non-WD drives from working, for example.