Information on hardware encryption on my Passport SE 1tb?

Hello, i use the hardware encrypted passport drives, have a couple of them and i have some questions about them.

First of all is it correct that the maximum password supported is 25 characters? I think i read it somewhere but i can’t find the source again, and WD is not giving any specific information about it anywhere i have searched. If this limitation is correct, why is that so? I think the AES 256 encryption standard supports many more characters, about 60 or 90 (i m not sure).

Then i have some questions about hardware encryption and how safe or breakable it is. I like to read about encryption and the latest news about it, but its mostly about software encryption. On the contrary i don’t see any research about hardware encryption or any attacks on it by researchers. Why is that? Has hardware encryption ever been broken? Is it even possible to be broken? What kind of attacks are there? Just the usual dictionary or brute force attacks?

The passport SE is encrypting the data at all times? And when a password is applied, it simply asks it to reveal the data? If the data are encrypted at all times (since it is hardware encryption) what is the process of reaching the data, when no password is applied to a drive? Is there a special mechanism in the drive that performs the encryption? Can it be disabled? Is there any way someone can physically open the drive, remove that mechanism and gain access to the password protected encrypted data? These and other questions, i have for my drives.

I don’t know the tech details about encryption. The hardware encryption is handled by a chip on a circuit board. The data is nearly impossible to recover if there is a problem with the board. Removing the drive and connecting as an internal or in a different case will only get you encrypted data. Hope this helps some.

Joe