Hardware encryption living on the enclosure rather than the disk, shingled recording in drives that were never labelled as such, and sealed helium units that cannot be opened conventionally. Each changes what is possible and what you should avoid.
WD puts hardware encryption in the USB bridge and runs it by default, with no password ever set. Nothing reveals this until the disk is separated from the board holding its key — and the board looks like packaging.
WD's colour naming is genuinely useful diagnostically. Blue is desktop duty, Black is performance, Red is NAS, Purple is surveillance and Gold is enterprise, and each arrives here having failed in ways that reflect what it spent its life doing.
The pattern worth knowing concerns externals rather than bare drives. WD My Passport and My Book units encrypt at the bridge board, not on the disk. Take the drive out of the case and you have a disk full of ciphertext with the key in the enclosure you set aside.
That single fact accounts for more avoidable difficulty than any hardware fault WD makes.
Blue WD10EZEX, WD20EZBX Desktop drives. Head stiction after a long spin-down and preamp failure. Often silent rather than clicking.
Black WD1003FZEX Performance desktop. Similar failure profile to Blue, generally with more hours on it when it arrives.
Red WD40EFRX NAS members dropping out of arrays. Frequently healthy enough to image, having been ejected on timeout rather than fault.
Purple WD40PURZ Surveillance duty under continuous write. Pulled from DVRs and NVRs where the recording matters.
My Passport and My Book Encrypting USB bridge. Send the whole enclosure — the key lives in the case, not on the disk.
Elements Simpler bridge, generally not encrypted. A healthy disk can often be read directly, though still send the case.
The advice circulating online is to remove the bare disk from a WD external and connect it directly. On Elements that frequently works. On My Passport and My Book it produces a drive that reports as unformatted, at which point Windows offers to initialise it and people accept.
If your drive is already out of its case, keep the case. Do not discard the board, the cable or the power supply even if the electronics look dead. On an encrypting bridge that small piece of hardware is the difference between a routine recovery and an impossible one.
Frequently not. Bridge boards and sockets fail at least as often as the mechanisms behind them, and a bridge fault on a healthy disk is among the cheaper recoveries.
Not on My Passport or My Book. The encryption key sits on the bridge board and a bare drive is unreadable without it. Send the whole unit.
Do not. That message means Windows cannot read the file system, which is exactly what a bridge fault or an encrypted disk out of its case looks like.
Usually a timeout ejection rather than a dead disk. Do not rebuild — power the unit down, label the bays and send every member.
From £300 +VAT for a single drive or external, £500 +VAT for array work, fixed after the free diagnostic.