WD Portable drive Linux compatibility

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

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

2

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.

3

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.