Volume Encryption/Decryption

Hi,

I recently fell victim to lightning damage to my entire network.

Unfortunately it took out all my devices, luckily the data seems to be all in-tact.

Today I’ve purchased a new EX4 NAS and moved my HDD from the damaged unit to the new unit.

All went well as it picked up RAID roaming and quickly merged my HDD to the new NAS. However the volume encryption is preventing me from mounting my HDD.

Volume encryption was enabled and I safely stored the encryption key. Now when I try to enter the key, it says that it is invalid. Impossible!!!

What now?

Ok…
So I took some time to discuss this with a local Data Recovery team and it appears that the encryption is hardware based, which is essence means that I pretty much screwed!

Thank WD for 0% fault tolerance on the EX4 framework for AES encryption. With my HDD’s configured in RAID 5 it would now cost me 4 times more than I would have paid for a standard RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration.
So much for fault tolerance on RAID if anything other than the drives fail.

Also the dual power supply is a stupid design, considering that it’s merely two supplies in parallel. The actual regulators that provides the power to the circuitry has 0 redundancy.

My concerns are the same as John1000 had;  http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud-EX4/Encryption-question/td-p/670629

Welcome to the WD Community. Sorry to hear you cannot access your files. Before you try anything else, I recommend you to contact support directly, they should be able to give you all available options. 

http://support.wdc.com/country/index.asp

Hi jubei04,

No need for you to be sorry.
I expected some sort of disclaimer from WD in this regard. The sceptism surrounding the encryption has been addressed on various posts before, but no concrete support has been given.

I have logged a support ticket, but I cannot wait anymore. I’ve been offline for too long. Cannot risk my backups also to fall prone to any disaster.

I have backups off all data except for the recent transfers.
Unfortunately the Data Recovery services charge a flat fee for the size of the entire array, not just the data you are looking for. I for one can’t see any sensible price justification for my loss of 50GB of data!

I would expect some sort of feedback from WD, other than "Sorry, nothing we can do abouth AES encryption!

I post their feedback here, unless they consider posting here directly!