They specifically say that My Passport Ultra Metal has “256-bit hardware encryption” ( http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1290), but I couldn’t find anywhere where they specifically say what type of hardware encryption the regular My Passport Ultra has.
Did you get any qualified reaction to your enquiry at the WD support in the meantime?
Coincidentally, I did the same today here in Germany.
For some reason WD is actively avoiding the term “256-Bit AES Encryption” on their regular Passport Ultra series’ descriptions (those with the WDBMW at the beginning of the product-number). While on their Ultra Classic series WDBBK and the metal series WDBEZ series it is stated multiple times! (at least on the german pages, I didn’t check with others)
The support told me that this was for no particular reason and I could rely upon the very same encryption in all three of the models. I hope this answer helps other people who are reading carefully enough to notice that difference and wonder as we did.
10 years later, these hard drives are still being marketed under the same names, so this topic, which was opened a long time ago, may still be of interest to buyers.
Having researched this information myself prior to purchase, my understanding is that all ‘My Passport’ external hard drives, in all their flavours, have a hardware encryption function enabled by default (Self-Encrypting Drive - SED); the encryption of data on the drive is enabled even if the user does not set a password.
In the absence of a password, the hard drive can read the secret key enabling it to decrypt itself. Any password chosen by the user is used to encrypt the secret key, to prevent the hard drive from decrypting itself, as long as the password is not supplied. It is not feasible to disable hardware encryption. In the event of a hard drive failure, the presence of encrypted data can make data recovery more expensive, or even impossible, if the failure completely prevents the secret key from being read back.
