Does WD use a standard HDD with SATA connector in all of their 3.5" external drive ?
I’m about to buy 2TB external, but I want to make sure that I can still take out the HDD and connect it to a desktop comp, just in case the USB connector breaks down.
I’ve learnt my lesson from my sister who bought portable 2.5" MyPassport last year , and the USB 3.0 connector failed , and all her data gone. Although the warranty replaced her with a new drive, the store would not help backing up the data inside.
The drives are not propietary, they are standard 3.5 drives. Passports are 2.5 although removing them from the case the difficult part without breaking the drive itself.
If the drive comes with Smartware it is hardware encrypted and connecting as an internal won’t work. You should probably look at the Elements drives. They are simple plug and play and do not use encoding.
Although it seems many people reported an ordinary SATA drive in WD Element & MyBook, I’ve read somewhere a user got a native USB for the Element (I think a user in amazon…I forgot) , so I decided to avoid them for now.
I’ve also read the password & hardware encryption make the drive unreadable & impossible to salvage the data without the original case.
So, I’ve ended up buying an internal HDD (WD Green 2TB EZRX) with an independant USB 3.0 enclosure.
As I speak, my desktop comp is backing up 940GB of data to the external drive right now.
