External hard drives that don't have hardware encryption

[rokio]

So i have a Seagate external drive who's usb port is causing the drive to lose connection if you just breath on it so i thought i could just remove the drive put it into a new enclosure and that would be that.

Turns out that is not the case as when i did put it in the enclosure it asks me to format the drive and does not recognise the data on it. I have since read that alot of these drives are encrypted so you can't just put them in any enclosure and it will pick up your data.

I am now looking for a new external drive so i can move all the data off my seagate drive (while i can still get it to connect) onto the new drive and then re-format the old seagate drive and put into the enclosure.

So i'm just wondering if there are any brands that sale external drives that are not encrypted so if i ever have an issue like this again i can just put it into a enclosure with no issues and it will pick up the files. Seagate seem to not be one and i read Western Digital have similar encryption aswell.

 

[USAFRet]

A regular internal HDD, either 3.5" or 2.5", and a bare drive enclosure.
No encryption and no weird software.

 

[scout_03]

you could get this https://www.newegg.com/Desktop-Internal-Hard-Drives/SubCategory/ID-14?Tid=167523 then use this https://www.newegg.com/Desktop-Internal-Hard-Drives/SubCategory/ID-14?Tid=167523 you put the drive in and copy all your files this one will not be encrypted since you use a plain hdd and a case .

 

[USAFRet]

you could get this https://www.newegg.com/Desktop-Internal-Hard-Drives/SubCategory/ID-14?Tid=167523 then use this https://www.newegg.com/Desktop-Internal-Hard-Drives/SubCategory/ID-14?Tid=167523 you put the drive in and copy all your files this one will not be encrypted since you use a plain hdd and a case .

Same link for both...

 

[scout_03]

https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=hdd+external+case&ignorear=0&N=-1&isNodeId=1 sorry t y

 

[Solandri]

Most of the external enclosures which have this "problem" aren't actually encrypted. They just use a small translation layer to get around the 2 TB max partition size limit on MBR-formatted disks. Probably to avoid users returning drives as defective when the only problem is the user failed to format it as GPT (which supports partitions larger than 2 TB). If they shipped the drives formatted as GPT, they would not be usable on older OSes (specifically 32-bit Win XP) unless repartitioned - an extra step which would cause those users to return a perfectly good drive as defective. So manufacturers came up with a hack in the enclosure's firmware to let it format drives larger than 2 TB as MBR. An unfortunate side-effect is that you cannot read the drive when it's plugged directly into a SATA port.

To read the drive, you can just pop it into another enclosure which does the same thing. An external drive with real encryption cannot be read in a different enclosure, as the encryption key is stored in the firmware of the original enclosure.

I suspect (but haven't tested since I don't own one of these external drives) that you can also avoid the problem if you format the drive as GPT before you write any data to it. If not, you can follow USAFRet's advice, and just buy an internal drive + empty external enclosure to avoid this problem.

 

[USAFRet]

Most of the external enclosures which have this "problem" aren't actually encrypted. They just use a small translation layer to get around the 2 TB max partition size limit on MBR-formatted disks.

Some of them are, though.
WD:
https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=15150

 

[rokio]

I was thinking about doing it that way.