#WD MY BOOK 3TB SOFTWARE PASSWORD#
#WD MY BOOK 3TB SOFTWARE PROFESSIONAL#

This is described on our website for all the products that feature hardware encryption.

#WD MY BOOK 3TB SOFTWARE PASSWORD#

It's up to the user's preference if they want to set a password or not, but the encryption of these drives is always on and cannot be turned off. The data on the drives with hardware encryption is always encrypted by a chip and cannot be turned off.

WD My Book and WD My Passport drives have the hardware encryption feature while other products such as the WD Elements - don't. I'm sorry to hear about the trouble with the drive. Luckly, here, this was used as a backup drive mainly, with only some stuff that wasn't backed, but, they still had the originals of the other stuff, so, I just reformatted the HD, and stuck it in a regular USB 3 case (with fan), and, no more of this encryption nonsense.Īnyone know if this encryption is always on, on ALL WD external devices now? With HDs this size and higher, that tends to cost thousands of $$$, so, this seems rather shortsighted by WD.

#WD MY BOOK 3TB SOFTWARE PROFESSIONAL#

It seems the only thing this does is make sending these drives to professional recovery services mandatory. Why is WD automatically doing this without the consent of the user? There is a encryption key that seems to be stored in a EEPROM chip most likely on the USB PCB, and I haven't seen any tools that could decrypt it.įunny enough, I just saw a press release from ACE recovery saying that can now crack this encryption of these units. Looking online, it seems that WD is doing this to 'protect your data', even if you didn't ask for said data to be encrypted to make it impossible to recover any info in case of disaster. I asked him if he ever set any password, and he said no, he just plugged it in, and starting writing data to it. That did work, the HD is seen, however, the data seems to be encrypted. A friend has a 4TB My book external drive, and his 2 year old managed to damage the unit from working.Īnyway, I was over there trying to help him get his data back, and opened up his case (it was out of warranty), and attempted to plug the HD into another machine I brought with me.

Wd my book 3tb software