Making a MyBook into Internal drive

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I have a couple newer External Drives that I would like to make internal. I understand that doing so, will most likely void the warranty, but im building a HTPC, and it just makes sense to make them internal.

After doing a search, I see that if you currently have data on the disk, making a PC recognize it without an issue seems difficult, if not impossible due to hardware encryption on the externals circuit board.

Im not worried about losing data, so if I just re-format in windows setup or DOS, am I all good to use as an internal drive?

Thanks.

Brian

2

It will depend of the My Book model you own, if the unit is a recent drive with Smartware is encrypted and the computer won’t see the drive. 

3

Even if you get the PC to see the drive the data will be encrypted and useless.

Joe

4

Both Awopero and Joe are right: Depends on the model, if you got the wrong one then you’ll get a hardware-encrypted drive you can’t use.

5

I was about to blast you all the giving bad information, however, I did do something a little different than what I had originally asked.

Same day I posted this, best buy had a good deal on 1.5 tb mybooks, I went and bought 2, took them out of their enclosures  without powering them on, installed in my HTPC and they work just like any “internal” drive. 

I would imagine they are powered on at the factory though for testing, so I dont see how this would change anything, but who knows.