WD - External HD how to Encrypt/Password protect

[craige4u]

Hello,

I have WD Passport tht i bought last year that advertises tht it has encryption.

So, downloading the WD-Software and creating a password is all I need to get going?

I guess it has hardware based encryption, so creating a password enables it?

I will be living soon with 2 guys in a room, and I fear they might try to steal my hdd and incase they do and they didn't know the password, I don't want them to ever recover data via any harddrive recovery tool.

So given my situation - Can I just use simple WD Software?

PS: The data is important, but not military top secret !

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey craige4u. The short answer is - "yes". The My Passport drives have hardware encryption which is always on and all you need to do is download WD Security for Windows and set a password. Non of the data recovery programs will have any success of getting the data and even if they manage to get something out, it will be encrypted and unreadable.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[adamwinn]

Have you tried accessing the data without the password (on your machine or another machine) to confirm it's not available?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey adamwinn. I'm not quite sure that I understood the question right. The hardware encryption is always on, but if you haven't set a password, the drive and the data in it would be accessible from each device you connect it to, like any other external hard drive.
On the other hand if you're asking if I've tried to take out data out of the drive which already has a password set - not this in particular. But basically the same thing happens to people's data when they have a problem with their HDD and decide to take the drive out of the enclosure. Because the encryption is hardware and not software, as soon as you take the drive out of the external enclosure or break the chip which encrypts the data, everything becomes basically unreadable and people sometimes go for data recovery companies' services, hoping to get their data back, but even then, nothing is guaranteed.

 

[craige4u]

Well okay, I like to ask if anybody who stole my external HDD goes to the recovery center with my drive, is it possible for the thieves to recover my data ?

 

[adamwinn]

Well okay, I like to ask if anybody who stole my external HDD goes to the recovery center with my drive, is it possible for the thieves to recover my data ?

Almost certainly not.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Just as @adamwinn mentioned, there's almost no chance of anyone getting the data from the encrypted drive. But note that this goes both ways, please be careful not to forget the password, or else you might get yourself in a quite unpleasant situation.