Hi,
I’m researching some external HDs. I’m looking at the My Book Duo currently. It seems a little unclear regarding the hardware encryption.
If the enclosure fails (with the two HDs remaining functional), would a replacement enclosure have the same hardware key? And a further question, would the replacement have to be another My Book Duo, or are the keys standard across different companies?
Thanks,
Chris
Hello,
Replacing the enclosure will not make your data accessible. If the enclosure fails a data recovery company may be able to recover the data.
99% of the time it would be a problem related to the hard drive and not the enclosure. Average lifetime of any hard drive nowadays is 2-3 years, so I would recommend setting up Mybook Duo as a Mirror and not a stripe. Hardware encryption on these drives is very much reverse engineered and can be replicated on the flight by tool like PC3000 that are used by professional data recovery companies. In order to avoid it make sure you always have 3 copies of the data somewhere 
One of the biggest problems is USB ports breaking off board.
Joe
My enclosure failed at 8 months. Internal drive was good. WD knows these enclosures are garbage but we don’t want to loose our backups so the warranties are useless.
