Disappointment

This is more a warning for anyone in the market for an external storage device for their computers. The reason for my not wishing to endorse Western Digital devices is for reason alone, a feature they have for automatically encrypting data stored on the device, doing so with hardware rather than software, with no way of bypassing or disengaging it.

Perhaps things have changed since I purchased my device a while ago, but I was unaware of this until the drive suddenly stopped working without any reason. I was ready to pop the drive into a new enclosure when I found out about the hardware encryption, which I did not choose to engage. In other words, this made data recovery impossible, unless you wanted to spend a lot of money for a professional service to do so. As I don't have any data on this device worth recovering, I will not go though route, but I am no less frustrated by this absolutely pointless feature (which offers little to no data protection if someone simply takes the entire device).

A failed external hard drive would have been an inexpensive and easy fix were it not for this feature with a new enclosure or even just a SATA drive (and ordering another device from the manufacturer would not be a remedy and the encryption is random).

Apart for this frustration, they do make decent drives, just be aware of this when choosing a model (and back up important files on another device as well).