Hardware encryption located inside the enclosure rather than on the disk; shingled recording in drives that were never labelled as such; sealed helium units that cannot be opened conventionally. Each changes what is possible and what you should avoid.
WD locates hardware encryption inside the USB bridge and runs it automatically without ever setting a password. The user has no idea this happens until their drive is separated from the board holding its key, and that board looks like packaging.
WD's colour coding is useful diagnostically. Blue is for desktop use, Black for performance, Red for NAS use, Purple for surveillance and Gold for enterprise, and each one arrives at our facility having failed in ways that reflect the usage it experienced over its lifetime.
The thing worth knowing about external WD devices (not the bare drive) is how they are encrypted. WD My Passport and My Book units encrypt at the level of the bridge board, which means the encryption does not happen on the hard drive itself; if you take the device apart, what you will see is a disk containing nothing but ciphertext, while the encryption key is contained in the enclosure you set aside.
This single aspect of WD's design has caused more unnecessary problems than any of WD's hardware faults.
Blue WD10EZEX, WD20EZBX Desktop. When they go bad (head stiction after a long spin-down, or preamp failure), they are often silent instead of clicking.
Black WD1003FZEX Performance desktop. Failure pattern similar to Blue models, usually with more hours on it when it arrives.
Red WD40EFRX NAS members that drop off arrays. Often good enough to be imaged, since they were removed from the array due to timeouts rather than a fault.
Purple WD40PURZ For continuous-write surveillance applications (pulled from DVRs and NVRs where the recording matters).
My Passport and My Book Encrypting USB bridge. Send the entire case: the key is located within the case, not on the hard drive inside.
Elements Simpler bridge, which in general will not be encrypted. A good-condition hard drive can often be read directly. However, you should still send the case.
The general advice being circulated online is to take the bare hard drive out of the WD external and plug the bare hard drive into your computer. It often works for Elements. For My Passport and My Book it generates a drive that is reported by Windows as unformatted. At this stage, Windows offers to initialise the drive, and many people do so.
Keep the case if your drive is already out of it. Don't throw away the PCB (board), the cable or the power supply, even if the electronics look dead. On an encrypting bridge, the small bit of hardware in this little box of electronics is the difference between a simple recovery and a complete loss.
Often not. The bridge board and socket failure rate is at least as high as that of the mechanism within. A bridge failure on a good-condition hard drive is among the cheaper recoveries.
Not on My Passport or My Book. The bridge board contains the encryption key, therefore you cannot read a bare hard drive without it. Send the whole unit.
Do not. The error message indicates that Windows can't read the file system. This is exactly what a bridge fault or taking an encrypted disk out of its case will look like.
Generally speaking, a timed-out ejection as opposed to a complete disk failure. Do not rebuild: shut down the unit, label all bays and send every member.
From £300 +VAT (single drive or external) or from £500 +VAT (array work), fixed after the free diagnostic.