Are the following external USB powered 2.5" drives compatible with Linux:
WD Elements Portable 4TB
WD My Passport 4TB
I understand the “My Passport” drive has hardware encryption. Can this be disabled?
I do not want to use any non standard security features (encryption, etc). I would just like to create a single ext4 partition and use the drive as a backup.
Thank you
Hello, uk-wdc-owner
Well, the drive WD Elements Portable and My passport is a mass storage drive which is compatible with any operating system, If we talk about to disable the encryption it cannot be because it is a hardware encryption on the drive The devices use 256-bit AES encryption, and can be password-protected giving the correct password enables the data to be successfully accessed.
A friend of mine recently bought a WD Elements Portable 5TB disk and found that it didn’t work on Linux. The firmware does not support the “WRITE SAME” SCSI instruction.
I’ve already seen a lot of botch in the IT sector, but simply not being able to support SCSI opcodes anymore is really blatant.
I believe this might also effect some WD Black 4TB gaming drives also.
I returned a WD Black 4TB gaming drive thinking it was defective. Then I bought 2 WD My Passport Ultra Drives and found they did not support Linux Ext4 file format. If you want a native Linux file system on these drives try xfs, however the drive name can not be My Passport, Use My-Passport instead. Many Linux distro’s use the xfs file system as the default. This seems to work well. But your mileage may vary, just to be warned.
WD portable hard drives are plug-and-play on Linux. If encountering recognition issues, disable UAS mode.
Both WD Elements Portable 4TB and WD My Passport 4TB drives are compatible with Linux. However, the My Passport model includes built-in hardware encryption that cannot be fully disabled — even if you don’t set a password. For a simple ext4 backup setup without encryption or proprietary features, the WD Elements drive is the better choice.
Both the WD Elements Portable 4TB and WD My Passport 4TB external USB drives are compatible with Linux and can be formatted with a single ext4 partition for backup use. The WD Elements drive is simple and does not include any encryption or proprietary software. The WD My Passport drive has built-in hardware encryption, but it is only active if you set a password using WD’s software. If no password is enabled, it works like a regular external drive and can be reformatted without issues. To avoid unnecessary complications, it’s best to leave the WD encryption features disabled and, if needed, use standard Linux encryption tools such as LUKS.
